


a million little gods causing rainstorms

by Inkjade



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Angsty things, Erik Has Feelings, Erik gets tricked into teaching, Erik has Issues, Funny things, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Peter is gloriously awkward, Post-X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), Raven is a badass, also dragneto, because Charles is sneaky, but probably not in the way you're thinking, dadneto, family things, generally lots of things, mostly canon-compliant, sad things, snarky things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-06
Updated: 2016-09-07
Packaged: 2018-07-21 22:41:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 25,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7408051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkjade/pseuds/Inkjade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles rolls forward for another few feet, looks back. “I wouldn’t be asking if I had better options,” he says quietly. Then he waits. He doesn’t need to say more: the weight of all that Erik owes him is pressing against the very air.</p><p>“Verdammt,” Erik mutters, but follows.<br/>~~~~~~~~~~~~~</p><p>Serenity is a stubborn, slippery, sneaky thing, much like certain friends that should have given up on him long since, but for some reason refuse to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Swear to god I won't abandon this one, not so much because my life has calmed down (it really, really hasn't) as because I've already finished it, muahaha.
> 
> Note: The Erik/Peter bits don't come until later, around chapter 9, but they are there, I promise!

He is wrapped in trees and silence, balancing on the fine edge of oblivion, when he feels the familiar-alien sensation of another mind within his own.

It brushes against the entirely inadequate barriers he has learned to build over years of dealing with telepaths, then creeps past them, with that veneer of polite apology that only Charles Xavier could be arrogant enough to paint over a power so mighty it can alter the world in a single moment of concentration. The intrusion, or possibly the reflexive surge of his anger which has always risen in response to such intrusions, pulls into focus the sensation of rough bark digging into the side of his face, pine needles and soft damp loam under his left elbow; the numb ache of his extremities and the listless emptiness of his body. He draws a breath that unfurls dull slivers of pain in his chest. Anger slips away from him like water through a fist: it does so easily, these days. As though he has finally exhausted his capacity for rage. He has no idea when he fell over, or how long he has been here. Long enough to have lost the ability to stand. Not long enough to have lost the ability to feel. There is a clammy film of condensation on his clothing and skin.

_I’m very sorry to intrude—_

Quintessential Charles, offering courtesies while kicking the door in.

The pause comes with a further imposition: Charles, alerted by some stray stolen thought or sensation, moves deeper into his mind. He shifts upright with a heaving, uncoordinated effort, resigned to what comes next. It doesn’t come, though—the nerve-jangling flare of anger-worry-frustration-disappointment that almost always accompanies Charles’ intruding on him when he’s injured (or injuring). Instead there is an appalled hush from the mind in his mind.

_Erik where are you,_ Charles sends, mental tone shorn of emotion.

As if he needs to ask.

Two shadowed mounds of dirt, curled next to one another like the wordless closing of a quote, are visible from where he sits. He knows that Charles can see them too. Above them, all around, a cathedral stillness. Mast pines climb into the distant pewter sky. There are no birds, no deer, no squirrels, no insects. Nina’s friends have left this place. He did a poor job with the graves, he realizes abstractedly. He had been in a hurry. Anger had not been a problem then.

_You’re dehydrated and hypothermic,_ Charles informs him, as though he cannot discern this himself, about his own body. That arrogance again, as much a part of Charles as his telepathy, or his foolishly boundless capacity for optimism in the face of overwhelming evidence. _You need water and warmth. I have something to show you, old friend._

He feels a brief spark of alarm, but Charles leaves no space for him to retreat: suddenly he is under hot, golden daylight, with the long lazy roll of the lawn at Westchester before him. A chaotic throng of children and teenagers playing some sort of ball game circles ahead; they fill the air with their shouts. The wind smells of mown grass and lilacs and sawdust. There is a sense of leashed strength in the children, some of whom he recognizes. Charles’ students, playing in the shadow of the newly rebuilt mansion, no longer naïve but still innocent. For a moment something bright and sharp and intolerable expands in him, pulling him out of the vision, knotting his numb hands into aching fists. Then it soothes away, and everything is **_CALM-QUIET-DARK-CALM-SLEEP-SLEEP-SLEEP_**.

He comes to briefly on the Blackbird, too exhausted to be startled by the roar of engines or the abrupt change of scenery. An IV feed is taped to the cephalic vein of his right hand. Hank McCoy’s irritated face is hovering over him.

_I should have kept the helmet,_ he thinks wearily.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik is sick; Charles is pushy; Jean knows the value of a tactical retreat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll probably update every 3 days or so normally, but as that first chapter was teensy and my weekend is shaping up to be madness, I figured I'd do this one now.

He sleeps for an indeterminate stretch of days, waking only briefly at the occasional touch or murmured conversation held within earshot of where he lies buried under what feels like a mountain of blankets. If he dreams, he never remembers; for the first time in his life his sleep is unaccompanied by the myriad ghosts of his past. He is too tired even to resent the substantial invasion of privacy this suggests. Behind his closed eyes he charts a shoreless sea of CALM-QUIET-CALM that leaves no room for thought or intention, and he would probably be grateful to be set so utterly adrift, if he could feel anything at all. He is light and hollow as a seed pod, indifferent to whatever Charles wants to do with him.

Then a redheaded teenage girl comes into his room late one afternoon while he is staring without interest at the patterns of leaf-shadow on the ceiling.

She is familiar in a vague, unsettling way. He watches her fiddle with a tray in his periphery, notes the straight, strong line of her shoulders. She comes close, sets the tray on the bedside table, and he meets her eyes without meaning to. They are sea-green and wise, lively with intelligence, and he thinks calmly that even at his best he would have never managed to recruit her. She is one of Charles’ down to the bone. And he is likely as far from his best as he has ever been in his life.

“No,” the girl says, and on hearing her voice he flashes on a bright gold burst of flame like spreading wings, a drowning sense of fatigue, a cry like a hawk’s hunting scream.

“You,” Erik says: appallingly, the word comes out in an old man’s rasp. He draws a breath that rattles in his chest.

“You’ve been sick, Mr. Lehnsherr,” the girl says. The unexpected formality of that address, when he has been defined and redefined and haunted by his other names for years, silences him as effectively as a slap. She places a small pile of pharmaceutical pills on the tray, discomfort crossing and vanishing from her face like a cloud passing over the sun. “You’re getting better.”

That statement certainly smacks of Charles’ wild optimism.

“No,” the girl says again gently.

“Telepath,” he husks. Among other things, clearly: he recalls now that she also handled the rebuilding of the mansion beside him. Mute in the aftermath of the fight in Cairo, he’d never asked her name. He had spoken only with Charles and Raven, and only briefly, until the work was done and it was time to leave.

Discomfort crumples the girl’s forehead once more; she gives him a bobbing shrug.

“I’m still learning to shut other minds out, Mr. Lehnsherr. It’s been harder since—um, since Cairo. I’m sorry.”

Considering the liberties Charles has taken with him lately, this minor intrusion doesn’t even rate a scowl. He tips his chin in a tiny nod and receives a smile of equal size. In spite of her youth, or perhaps because of it, her reserve has weight: suddenly he is anchored, aware of the room around him, the hum of carbon-laced steel in the bedframe and brass in the dresser knobs, the copper pipes within the walls. The weakness and ache of his body. He needs a shower, and the armor of clothing. He has no idea what he’s wearing under the blankets, but it can’t be much.

Sitting up proves less achievable than he’d thought, however. He is appalled all over again at the trembling of his arms as he drags himself by degrees up against the headboard.

The girl, with a look of alarm that is decidedly unflattering, fumbles several pillows into place behind him, so careful not to touch him that he suspects she gleaned a great deal more than a few stray thoughts from his mind. She hovers, her composure beginning to fray. Her eyes flicker and fix on some distant point in a way he has seen many times before. “Charles will be here soon, I presume,” he says. She blinks down at him, her brows rising briefly into that mass of red hair.

“I’m here now, in fact. And here you are as well, back among the living,” Charles says from the doorway. The girl’s stiffening shoulders confirm what Erik remembers about that breezily casual tone. He sighs and drags himself a sorry centimeter higher against the pillows. Charles pushes himself into the room. The chair is still a thoroughly jarring sight. So is the naked dome of Charles’ head. “I see you’ve met Jean again, Erik, though I don’t believe you two were ever formally introduced, were you? Jean Grey, Erik Lehnsherr. Jean is one of my most promising students, besides the small detail of her having saved all of our lives, of course. Mine twice, in fact. I believe you built a house together, yes? Yes. Marvelous. _Thank_ you, Jean.”

Charles is clearly furious.

“Pleasure,” Erik murmurs. Jean wisely flees the room.

Erik shuts his eyes. The steel in the chair is nearly pure: it is a vivid presence in his metal-sense as Charles wheels up to the bed. More vivid still is the density of anger and sorrow pressing in at him from the other mind in the room.

“You’re leaking, Charles,” Erik says, and then ruins it by coughing. It is impossible to get under control. He folds away from his position against the pillows, chest heaving, throat filling with the fluid from his lungs, and thinks irritably that nothing ever quite works the way he intends it to when he is in this particular house.

“Now so are you,” Charles says drily, and passes him a perfectly pressed square of a handkerchief. “My version seems considerably less painful. And few things work the way I intend here either, though to be fair that seems to happen everywhere I go. Hold on, I’ll get you a glass of water.”

There is a full glass right on the tray next to him. Charles follows Erik’s eloquent look and plucks it up, handing it over with a gracious little nod. _Thank you, your majesty,_ Erik thinks with pointed force, and sees the tiny mouth-quirk that is Charles trying not to smile before he tips the glass to his lips.

_What were you thinking, Erik, honestly? Do you have any idea how far gone you were when Raven and Hank found you?_

“Aloud,” Erik rasps, and sips, swallowing against the urge to cough again. “Please, Charles,” he adds when the sense of furious sorrow in his head doesn’t let up. He doesn’t think he can bear anyone else’s sorrow now. The pressure of Charles’ presence eases. Erik draws a careful breath, testing the limits of his lungs. They feel a bit more stable.

“You’ve had pneumonia,” Charles says, even-toned. “You were also without water for several days, and you have many of the symptoms of exposure. So I’ll ask you again, old friend: what the bloody hell were you thinking, and why didn’t you come to me?”

He had no intention of answering questions. But Charles’ voice cracks on the last few words, and he is speaking before he knows he is going to speak. Charles has always had that effect on him, with or without the telepathy.

“I didn’t” —he coughs, takes another sip— “I didn’t plan to stay out there so long. It just got away from me.”

“Your _life_ nearly got away from you.”

“That wasn’t my intention.”

Charles is silent, considering that. He considers it too; it is impossible not to right now, with the man who knows him best giving the matter his full, substantial attention. He doesn’t think he planned to die. He’d just wanted to go where he could harm no one else; where there were no expectations pulling him in any direction. Where the weight of his memories and his many names couldn’t press him into some new (or old) shape.

When Charles says nothing, he wonders, and decides he doesn’t care.

“You’re staying here for now,” his friend finally tells him. Erik can feel the old resentment at Charles’ high-handedness trying to stiffen his spine, but it doesn’t do more than make him sit up slightly against the pillows: he’s still too tired for pride. Charles raises a brow, a rather dramatic expression with no hairline to soften it. “The world knows you fought with us against En Sabah Nur in the end, my friend; but they also have reason to suspect what you’re truly capable of, even if there were no cameras to confirm it. By extension, what mutants are capable of. I’ve adopted a few of your less…extreme ideas. We’ve made this school something of a fortress in your absence. You should be safe here.”

The world, Erik thinks, may know what Charles is capable of, too, even if they don’t necessarily know it was him and not the false god that sent every nuclear missile on the planet into space. Then the rest of what Charles said sinks in, and he can’t help his startled glance. Charles offers him a cool smile.

“You were wrong about many things, Erik, but not all of them.”

“Why thank you, Charles,” Erik murmurs, and the tight smile on Charles’ face turns briefly into a boyish grin. The sight makes something in the vicinity of his battered lungs ache. “I’m cleaning up now.” He follows this declaration, which was meant to get Charles out the door, by pushing clumsily at the mountain of blankets for the better part of a minute, succeeding only in sliding weakly around on the bed like an idiot. Charles is still there when he gives up with a pathetic cough, buried now in pillows. The not-smile is back.

“You’re still quite ill, my friend. Start with something simpler. I’ll have someone bring you lunch, shall I? You need to rest, and heal.”

One seems unavoidable; the other, impossible. He can tell by the softening of Charles’ expression that he didn’t manage to keep this thought to himself.

“I’ll stay for a while,” Erik says to the far wall. They both know he has no choice at the moment. “Until I’ve recovered. No promises, Charles.”

“Of course not,” Charles says, which means nothing but that he is saving his argument for later.


	3. Chapter 3

He falls asleep again before the threatened meal arrives, weighed down by quilts and Charles’ relentless concern. Magda’s hands shape his face; she whispers something he cannot understand. Nina is singing somewhere nearby but he can’t see her. Something is in the room with them, between them, something indefinable, crucial, precious. Slipping away. It makes him frantic. He presses his wife’s hands to the feverish skin of his temples. There is a noise near his head and he thrashes awake on the floor in a fluffy, strangling knot of bedding, breathing in groaning gasps and shaking as if from deep cold.

“Jesus, Erik.”

At the sound of Mystique’s—Raven’s—voice, he forces himself to stillness, rests the back of his head on the cool floorboards. She is above him, crawling across the bed he just rolled out of, her startled yellow eyes on his face. The light in the windows has changed: it is early morning. He's lost time again. His pulse is rattling in his ears. Erik draws an unsteady breath, pulls himself up on elbows and wrists until his back is against something solid. His lower half is shrouded in sheets that are a disturbingly cheerful shade of blue; he only realizes that his torso is bare when wood touches the skin between his shoulders, smooth and chill as dry ice.

Raven—she is definitely Raven now—becomes motionless, watching him with the wary eyes of a predator. Gradually, as his breathing begins to settle, he realizes that the rattle wasn’t his pulse after all but the knobs on the dresser, and something he can’t see but that feels and sounds like silverware.

“Can you—”

Erik gestures curtly with one hand, meaning _shut up_. Raven does so without any of her usual pithy commentary: she’s seen him in the aftermath of enough nightmares to know exactly how much space he needs. He shuts his eyes, reaches for his metal-sense, noticeably depleted but still a roil in his bones, and he grapples with it slowly, carefully, until he has some semblance of control. The effort leaves him trembling and filmed with sweat.

Raven’s face is right in front of him when he opens his eyes. He stifles the impulse to flinch back. There are noises in the hall outside the room now; footsteps, excited, worried young voices. “You’re better than an alarm,” Raven says wryly. “Everyone will be on time for breakfast today.” Erik doesn’t yet trust his voice enough to reply: he lifts a brow.

A little girl of perhaps seven materializes in the doorway, peering at them over the bed with an expression of dubious curiosity. She is dark-haired, thin, and solemn; there is a starburst-spread of green like a tattoo under her left eye. He can hear the breath catch and freeze in his chest. He can’t look away from her. She is nothing like Nina. But the expression is very similar.

“Elise, we talked about this,” Raven says. A flush stains the girl’s cheeks: she wavers like a mirage, then vanishes.

“Interesting power,” Erik comments when he can speak.

Raven scrutinizes him for a moment, carefully free of expression. He bears that, makes himself hold her gaze though he has no idea what is on his own face at the moment, how much she can read there: his hold on his facial muscles feels as questionable as his hold on his power. “Whew,” she finally says, visibly mastering the sympathy he can see in her eyes. “I brought you breakfast, but I’m thinking you should probably shower first.”

“I’d love to,” he replies drily. “I’m just not certain I can stand.”

“Well, let’s find out. You’re a little ripe.”

“Your opinion is noted,” Erik mutters, and Raven rises to her feet in a single, fluid movement like a cat. She extends one hand, then both, with a little grabby gesture of fingers when he doesn’t immediately take the offered help.

“I forgot how grumpy you are in the mornings,” she grunts, hauling him up like a fish from a river. The sheets, thankfully, are wrapped tightly enough about his hips that they mostly come with him when she pulls him to his feet. But his knees buckle almost as soon as she releases his weight, and she ducks to heave a shoulder under his arm. The pressure against his ribs forces a cough out of him. He wilts in her grip while he fights the convulsion of his lungs. Raven maneuvers them toward the wall and pins him there, holding him upright while he struggles to breathe.

“I’m not so sure you can stand after all. Maybe you should take a bath instead.”

“No.” He is not about to sprawl in a tub like a child while Raven waits outside the door, or, judging by the anxious expression on her face, right in the room with him. He’d rather be filthy. Shaw used baths as another opportunity for stress testing, forcing his head under the water until—

“ _Erik._ ”

The wall is vibrating against his back. The pipes within it groan and reach for him. He swallows a cough and wrestles a second time with his metal-sense. Again, the effort leaves him weakened and winded. The sheets are creeping down his hips. He heaves a sigh, beyond caring. She has seen all the scars. Raven folds her hand gently over his where it clutches a knot of linen, her soft scales rasping against his fingers, and pulls until he’s covered to the waist.

“Not that I don’t appreciate the view, but Elise might pop in again,” she says. “Kid’s got the impulse control of a cocker spaniel. Come on, let’s get you in the bathroom; we can figure it out from there. God, Erik…”

“Ready when you are,” he rasps, and stumbles forward without waiting.

She is concerned—justifiably, he has to admit—that he’ll fall on his own, and he will not allow her to hold him up while he washes the accumulated sweat and grime of an as-yet undetermined number of days from his skin. They compromise: she stands outside the shower door, which is mercifully opaque, and he is forced to sit on the cold tile floor under the spray, fighting down fits of shivering from fever and the memories that crowd his mind. He has little defense against either, feeble as he is. By the time he pulls himself to his feet and accepts the towel Raven passes over the door his hands are twitching and there is enough of the old fury chilling his thoughts that he can walk unaided to the bed, wrapped in the towel. But it drains away. He just doesn’t have the energy for rage anymore.

Someone has changed the bedding. Erik casts a glance around the room, sees that the tray Raven brought has been replaced with a new tray, on which rests a plate of scrambled eggs and pancakes drowning in syrup, strawberries, a glass of water and a steaming cup of tea. More pills. He frowns down at the strawberries, turns to pull open a dresser drawer at random, wondering what sort of clothing he’ll find. If it’s sweatpants or a shirt with an X anywhere on them, he will spend the duration of his stay here wrapped in towels.

He finds jeans and simple, dark button-down shirts with long sleeves, well-worn but clean. Charles again, no doubt, remembering his preference for covering everything below his collarbones. He wonders who the clothes belonged to, if they outgrew them. If they are even alive now. Raven turns away while he dresses, fumbling with buttons, his fleeting rush of almost-normal strength deserting him. He sits on the bed, irritated and alarmed at his body’s inability to respond to his will.

“Get under,” she orders. “You’re going to fall asleep after you eat this, you might as well be tucked in.” Ignoring for the moment the insulting notion of being tucked in, Erik casts a pointed glance at the food. Raven rolls her eyes. “No, we’re not drugging you, though god knows that might be the only way to make you hold still long enough to get better. You’ve passed out after every meal.”

He can’t remember any other meals.

“How long?” he asks, and Raven suddenly becomes busy rearranging the tray to her liking.

“Eleven days, Erik.”

He stares at her, then down at the strawberries. They are bright red and lush, the visual opposite of his physical state. The gap between waking up in the Blackbird and waking up yesterday is a pit peppered with scattered, blurry views of the windows, the ceiling, hands holding syringes. He fixes his gaze on the pitted crimson skin of one strawberry and struggles to reclaim more, some sort of context, but he gains only the feeling of a needle sliding into the crook of his right arm, the sensation of struggling to rise and being pressed down. It sets off echoes of the worst sort. His breath comes faster; the muscles of his abdomen tighten. Raven lays a hand on his shoulder. His flinch this time would be impossible to miss.

For a moment he doesn’t think he can master it, his control has been frayed so thin. But he shuts his eyes and brushes her hand away. She sighs.

“Eat something, Erik,” she says on the way out the door.

She knows exactly how much space to give him now, too.


	4. Chapter 4

Two days later, when the need for distraction outweighs the desire to remain wrapped in moderate solitude, he ventures out for the first time. Almost immediately he is bewildered at the emptiness of the halls.

It occurs to him that Charles might have cleared them out, his students, while he deals with an unstable former terrorist/current fugitive. The thought seems ridiculous in the next second, as he makes his slow way down a corridor that is both new and intensely familiar. Charles would never do that to his students, and Charles has always had too much faith in him. In spite of the chair, and the new and old scars. The disquieting vulnerability of that bare head.

The wreckage Erik trails behind him everywhere he goes.

For such a brilliant man, Charles has appalling blind spots.

He makes it all the way down the main staircase before he realizes the silence isn’t emptiness but industry: school is in session. There are students crowded in rooms with half-open doors, listening to, arguing with, or ignoring teachers. One such teacher is Hank McCoy—blue-skinned, bespectacled, fanged and furred, looking entirely comfortable with both his audience and his form. A flicker of interest slows Erik’s steps: he pauses to watch.

The kitchen is not so very different. He rummages aimlessly until he finds a kettle and a simple herbal tea, sits at the counter to wait for the water to boil. He’s already regretting the two flights of stairs he descended to get here, the impending struggle to climb them. But it was worth it: even the simple act of making tea is better than staring at the walls and wondering what he is supposed to make of himself. If there is anything left with which to work. He pours, stirs, carefully shunting aside the many past layers of this act, which was performed over and over in a kitchen in Poland (joy), in a kitchen that stood where this one stands (friendship), in a kitchen somewhere in Bavaria, in a town whose name he seldom chooses to remember (safety).

Idly he lifts the spoon to eye level, tries to bend it at the bowl, then at the stem. It is nearly pure silver (of course it is), a malleable brightness almost too smooth for his power to grip. Silver does not magnetize, but he can make it spin and twist in response to fields from other sources in the room. The exercise is comforting, and marginally interesting. There is still a lingering pull on his metal-sense, reminder of power he’d never imagined he could touch, let alone tap. The ponderous cycling of convection currents in magma; the deafening flex and contraction of fields deep under the bedrock. The sweet and total sweeping-away of mind and memory, rage and sorrow, until he was nothing but a conduit for the unfeeling earth.

It had been the closest thing to peace he had ever known.

A sound shocks him out of his stupor: the spoon clatters on the countertop, the kettle crashes down onto the stove. From across the kitchen, half-hidden behind a block of cupboards, a small boy stares at him. His ink-black hair stands up in messy sleep-spikes; his dark face still bears the creases of a pillow. His gaze is wide and wondering. Erik breaks eye contact, drinks the hot tea, and the boy shuffles toward him on silent sock feet, pausing every few seconds like a wary fawn leaving the shelter of a thicket.

_Papa, see the baby! I told him not to be afraid of us._

He must make some sort of noise: the boy freezes. Erik takes a hot, too-large mouthful of tea and swallows past the iron lodged in his throat. The muscles of his face pull at each other. He breathes, shunts aside, sips at the tea, breathes some more. Apparently concluding that this particular adult is not quite insane, the boy shuffles the rest of the way to the counter and laboriously climbs onto a stool across from Erik. He stretches out a hand still chubby with baby fat. A line forms between his brows when he doesn’t quite manage to reach the spoon. Erik pushes at it: it slides across the countertop. The boy snatches it up with a grunt and holds it to his face for inspection.

“How’d you do that,” the boy says.

“I’m a mutant,” Erik says.

The boy yawns hugely, displaying a healthy set of tonsils, then sticks the spoon in his mouth with a considering expression. Whatever it tastes like must be disappointing: he lets it fall to the counter with a weighty sigh. “I’m Marcus.”

“Hello.”

“I’m a mutant, too.”

Erik, out of words, nods. The boy props his chin on one fist and stares. Erik returns to his tea, letting the cooling liquid wear away the clench in his throat.

When he pulls himself up the stairs the boy follows him at a meager distance, with the thoughtless curiosity of a child who has been given no reason to fear the labyrinthine expanse of these halls or the sometimes dangerous unpredictability of adults. It is an eloquent comment on what Charles has wrought here.

Against his better judgment he leaves the door cracked, pretends not to notice the pair of eyes watching him from the threshold.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another insane weekend approacheth, so I figured I'd get this one up beforehand. And thank you all for your lovely comments. :)

“I should be out of your hair in a day or two,” Erik says quietly.

His king’s rook hovers over a currently defenseless bishop as he contemplates the ways this might reel him into the trap Charles has been setting for the last eleven moves. It’s been a while since he played. He’s utterly focused on the exercise, and the mental reprieve of a thorough distraction. Charles has always been a worthy opponent.

A small noise from across the chessboard, more than a sigh but not quite a gasp, startles him out of the cool, mathematical certainty of possible moves and their repercussions. He glances up, meets Charles’ incredulous blue gaze. Sees again (always with the same tiny shock, as if for the first time) the pale, bare skin above it.

“Sorry,” Erik says, honestly dismayed.

Eyes dancing, Charles props an elbow on the arm of the chair, crooks his finger over the small quirk at the corner of his mouth as though to hold it in place. It widens into a smile, then a failed attempt to speak. Erik decides against taking the bishop—it will definitely trigger the closing of the trap. He watches as Charles folds his hand over his face, hiding much of his expression, and surrenders to a silent, shoulder-shaking fit of laughter punctuated by panting and the occasional undignified wheeze.

“Oh god, I’m sorry, it’s just,” Charles says, his voice strained with the effort to stop laughing. He’s not having much luck. The sight tugs on a hundred bittersweet strands of memory, though Erik can think of only a handful of occasions when he has seen Charles this comprehensively undone. Making a perceptible effort to pull himself together but keeping the hand plastered to his face as though he doesn’t quite trust himself, Charles swipes at mirth-tears with thumb and forefinger. “Good lord. You have idea no idea how hard Raven’s been trying not to say that. She’s convinced my fragile ego will shatter.”

“And are you planning to put her out of her misery anytime soon?”

“Now why would I do that,” Charles says, grinning at him though his fingers.

“Telepaths.”

“Siblings, Erik, siblings,” Charles replies. “I don’t need my powers to know how to get Raven’s goat. It’s the sacred charge of all brothers. Have you forgotten it’s your move, or have you decided to prolong the inevitable by levitating that rook in place until I fall asleep?”

Erik lays the tip of one finger on a knight, considering. He lets the rook settle back to its place. “Are you tired?”

“Yes.” Charles rubs his right temple with a faint look of surprise, as though he’d intended to say something different. Then he smiles.

It is genuine: it is also a distraction not many people think to look past. Erik elevates a single brow and leans into the back of the chair, tips his head to show that he isn’t fooled. He is suddenly conscious of the cant of his shoulders, the particular tilt of his chin. He can feel himself falling into the old, well-worn pattern of humor and challenge stippled with moments of startling honesty that is matching wits with Charles Xavier. It’s like cold water after a long day in the sun. He missed it more than he knew; more than he wanted to know.

He thinks of Magda laughing over a scalded pot of stew, at one of his more specious arguments, under a thick layer of quilts in the January cold, and a sick clench of grief grips him. He is disgusted by his callousness.

“Mourning them doesn’t mean you stop feeling other things,” Charles says. Only the utter lack of pity in his voice keeps Erik from rising from the chair, leaving the room.

“Stay out of my _head_ , Charles.”

“I try. I do try, my friend. Sometimes you think more loudly than I can block.”

He blinks, meets Charles’ level gaze. It had never once occurred to him that Charles, who even in their chaotic first meeting always seemed so perfectly in control, had no choice. Why did he never say so? _I sacrificed my powers so that I could sleep_ , he’d said on that bewildering and awkward flight to Paris, and Erik, torn between a dubious, stinging joy at seeing him after ten years of solitude and growing horror of the threat that had forced Charles’ hand, had not added that simple sum.

“Think of reading a book in a crowded restaurant,” Charles says lightly, watching his threatened king as though it is going to move on its own. “As long as you focus, you can tune out the conversations happening around you, but never entirely. And some people have very ordered, clear thoughts. They…” he wiggles the fingers of his right hand “…cut through the ambient noise, so to speak.”

“I gather you’re saying I’m one of the loud ones at the bar.”

Charles props chin on fist, with that look that says he’s seen much more than Erik wants him to. Again. “If you’re planning to add this to the tally of injuries done me, Erik, let me stop you now. I—well, I’ve no idea what it would be like to lose one’s sight, or hearing, but I imagine it might be similar to losing the unavoidable, faint contact I have with people I know well. Even Miss Frost admitted to me once that she found it necessary to have the reassurance of a few familiar minds around.”

 _Tally of injuries._ Embarrassing, to realize Charles has known that all along. It tries to become resentment, another track he and Charles have tread many times. Erik pushes the reaction aside. He left the helmet in Washington in part because he’d known he had little choice, but he could have gone back for it at any point early in the decade that followed. He’d left another version of the helmet in the wreckage of Cairo, a more deliberate act. A sort of yielding, difficult even in the dazed, numb state he had been in at the time. The only wordless way he’d had of making a promise not to harm Charles’ students, Charles himself.

(Anymore.)

His word has never been worth much.

Eternally hopeful he may be, but Charles has surely had concerns. He would be insane not to. “Look, if you want,” Erik says quietly, surprising the professor into a huff of breath. Charles snatches at his scotch, takes a quick sip, frowns.

“I’ll look if _you_ want,” he says, a rough edge on the words. “Don’t make me your penance, Erik. That’s not what I am. I’m your friend.”

Yes, but why?

He’s not sure if he’s thinking loudly on purpose or not, but Charles takes it as a request.

The answer comes in a flickering series of images, almost too rapid to process: himself in the Atlantic, half-drowned and furious, then astonished at learning there was another like him in the world. Himself standing in the dark outside their short-lived CIA base, the struggle to choose between two impulses of unprecedentedly equal strength far more evident than he’d known at the time. Standing tense against the low wall of the estate with the smug blank curve of the satellite in the distance, the renewed memory of his mother written all over his features. A slightly drunken night in a hotel in New York City, humming under his breath to Bob Dylan. A beach in Cuba; an elevator in the Pentagon. Half a hundred other moments.

The breath is trapped in his chest when Charles stops. His expression feels unruly, fluid, too open. Even in this rattled state he’s grateful that Charles didn’t press emotions on him along with the images: he knows that Charles could have. Seeing himself as Charles has seen him is disorienting in a way he has never experienced. He reaches for his glass of scotch and hides behind it for the length of a long, burning sip.

“You did ask,” Charles says.

“That wasn’t really an answer.”

Charles shrugs, a dreadfully normal gesture amid this intimacy. “It will have to do. I have feared you, I’ve even hated you at times, Erik, but I’ve always been your friend.”

 _Likewise_ , Erik thinks, but there’s too much hypocrisy in that claim to give it voice.


	6. Chapter 6

“Did you tell him?” Raven asks her brother over breakfast. In the last few days she and Charles have taken to eating in his room in the mornings, probably in some sentimental attempt to ground him in company. It has the opposite effect, in Erik’s opinion. He can appreciate the intent and still be irritated by it: those two things have more often than not been entwined into one experience, with Charles and Raven.

Charles sends his sister a sidelong glance. “Ah,” Raven says. “Well, get on with it please, Charles, I want that girl in my danger room.”

“Are you quite sure you’re calling it that?” Erik murmurs into his tea. Raven glares at him.

“It does sound a bit like a gentlemen’s club in some seedy industrial sort of place, doesn’t it,” Charles says, staring moodily at a forkful of eggs.

“Shut up, Charles. When you start training them in it, you can name it. Actually when you start _training_ in it you can name it. I didn’t, by the way, this one is all Peter’s fault. I can’t tell when he’s being funny and when he’s just being the huge dork that he so clearly is, but he picked it and it stuck. My _point_ was that she won’t go near it and I think she could be a real asset, so get off your ass, big brother.”

“Detroit,” Charles muses. “Possibly Atlanta.”

“Hopeless,” Raven grouses. “And Atlanta’s not industrial at all, obviously you’ve never been there. Give me that last piece of toast.”

“The world on a platter, for you.”

“That’s just toast on a plate, Charles.”

“But it’s your toast on a plate now.”

“Also the jam, please.”

“Well, now you’ve gone too far.”

They bicker and gibe until the tea is gone and Erik’s got a headache forming behind one eye. Then Charles gets an abstracted look, murmurs “Oh, dear,” and leaves without remembering to remove the napkin tucked absurdly into his collar.

Raven leans out the door to watch him go; she calls out “Do you need help?” as the sound of the chair fades from the hall. Erik winces.

“He can’t hear you now.”

“Yeah, that was sort of the point.” She shuts the door and stands against it. “It’s probably Tamin frying the drapes again, and I don’t need any more of that in my life. That kid breathes fire. Actual fire. And he’s eight and as hyper as Sean was. He spent half of last week pretending he was a dragon, until Hank got fed up and invented some kind of breath mint that suppresses flames.”

It takes Erik a moment to realize that the pressure in his chest isn’t a relapse but the urge to laugh. He swallows it away and repeats, “Breath mint.”

Raven flicks a dismissive gesture at the ceiling. “Something like that. I don’t really want to know the specifics, it was Charles who had to get the thing down Tamin’s throat. Anyway, I take it my brother hasn’t bothered to mention that there was actually a reason he wandered into your head two weeks ago.”

Erik stacks the plates and cups neatly on the tray. “No.”

Raven _hmmm_ s critically, comes to collect the tray. “Okay. Well, just hear him out, will you?”

“Raven—“

But she is gone, slipping out the door.

He finds Charles benevolently overseeing a roomful of young mutants scribbling into notebooks, and hovers outside the door until Charles notices him. His old friend has rarely looked so content: he was born to teach. “Ah, Erik,” Charles says, as though the interruption is a planned part of the classroom schedule. Eight faces raise to pin Erik to the threshold with curiosity and the evident hope of a reprieve. Charles beckons him inside with a lazy wave. Erik, sensing a trap, doesn’t move.

“A word, Charles.”

“Of course, just a moment. Keep writing, you rascals, you’re not off the hook. Two pages on the code of knighthood in T.H. White’s _The Once and Future King_ , which I hope for your sakes you’ve actually read, and no talking. Except while I introduce you, that is. This is Erik Lehnsherr, class, you’ve probably seen him levitating above the lawn building this very house, or more recently skulking in the kitchen at odd hours. He was one of my first students.”

They look at him again. “I was,” Erik allows, though it is a gross oversimplification of that entire stretch of time when he lived here. He stares them down until most of them look away.

“Hi,” says a boy who doesn’t find something else to look at. His hair is dark green. It doesn’t look like dye, his eyebrows are the same color. “Didn’t you kill a president?”

“Not actually, no,” Erik replies. “But not for lack of trying.”

“Woah,” someone whispers.

“Charles. A word.”

“Perhaps we ought to focus on the challenges to King Arthur’s system of justice for the next essay,” Charles says drily. “Keep writing, I’ll be back in thirty minutes. If you’re not all of you done when I return, you can expect to write an additional two pages for homework tonight on a much less interesting subject. Quadratic equations. The physical properties of water. _King Lear_.”

There is a collective groan from the room as Charles exits. “They don’t like Shakespeare, for god’s sake,” he mutters. “What am I doing wrong?”

“Most normal kids that age probably don’t.”

“I loved Shakespeare.”

“I’m not sure how this supports your argument,” Erik says.

“Ha bloody ha. Come with me, there’s something I want to show you.”

“This would be what you were planning to show me two weeks ago, I take it.” Charles hums a noncommittal reply, pushing himself toward the stairs that lead down to the lower level. The elevator is behind them. Erik grips the chair in his metal-sense, lifts it a few inches off the floor and sends it smoothly down the stairs, following behind it. There is a lingering rattle at the bottom of his chest: he prefers to push his body in small ways until it goes away. “Charles, please stop being coy.”

“I’m not, honestly—it’s just easier if I do, in fact, show you. I could use your help with something.”

More renovations, perhaps. The lowest level that survived the explosion is a marvel of technology, labs and training rooms and surveillance equipment, all leading to the long corridor that ends in Cerebro. It is bright with steel, pulsing against his metal-sense. They pass through the security door and he sets Charles’ chair down.

“Not your services as impromptu building contractor and sentinel-stealer, generous as they have been,” Charles says. “This is a new student, struggling with an unusual power that shares some similarities with your own. I’m hoping you can help her.”

Erik stops. Charles rolls forward for another few feet, then looks back. “I wouldn’t be asking if I had better options,” he says quietly. He doesn’t need to say more: the weight of all that Erik owes him is pressing against the very air.

“ _Verdammt_ ,” Erik mutters, but, when Charles knocks briefly on a door before opening it, he follows.

A girl in perhaps her middle teens sits at a table, reading a thick novel. Her dark hair is a mass of curls; her face wears a frown that looks comfortable there, as though she rarely takes any other expression. She is painfully thin, covered from chin to ankles in jeans and a purple turtleneck, and when she looks up at them a tiny twitch runs through her body. One of her eyes is brown. The other is a coppery sunset flare, black speck of pupil drowning in the color.

“Genevieve,” Charles says genially. The girl closes her book, stands. Judging by the state of the bed in the back of the room, she is sleeping here. Erik glares at Charles, who ignores this with the ease of long practice. “This is the man I was telling you about. I’m so glad you two could meet. Genevieve Croll, Erik Lehnsherr. He and I have known each other for many years.”

“Magneto,” the girl says, getting to her feet and rubbing her palms on her jeans. “I watch the news.”

“Just Erik, these days,” Erik says. “Why aren’t you upstairs with the rest of them?”

Genevieve thumbs the book. “I hurt people,” she says to it, in a casually defiant tone that dares him to make something of that.

Charles needs his head examined, bringing him here. “If that’s what relegates one to the lower level,” Erik says, “I should be several meters underground.”

“Erik,” Charles sighs. “Genevieve chose this room herself. I’m hoping I can convince her to join us upstairs soon.”

“This is fine, Professor, thank you,” the girl says, stiffly formal.

“And you may stay here for as long as you feel it’s best. I won’t push you to come up, but I hope you’ll decide to, once you feel more comfortable with your powers.”

She snorts. She is backing away from them in nearly imperceptible increments, disguising it as fidgeting. “Fat chance.”

“You’ve no idea how many times I have heard that,” Charles says, smiling gently. “Or said it myself. I was very young when mine arrived, and I thought I was going mad. I hurt everyone close to me, more than once. It was very difficult, and I was a bit of an idiot already. If I could manage to control it, I promise you, you can.”

Erik has seen plenty of young mutants melt into the warmth of that heartfelt soft-sell: he almost did himself once. Genevieve doesn’t. She gives Charles a flinty, expressionless stare worthy of royalty statues and front-line generals, and stuffs a hand into the pocket of her jeans. A pulse at his metal-sense catches his attention: there is a folding knife there; cheap steel, rust wearing away the brightness of the metal. “Show him, will you my dear?” Charles entreats, as though he has no idea the girl is armed. “Please. It’s perfectly safe. Neither of us is without defenses.”

She casts a nervous glance at Erik, who shrugs wearily.

In the next second he has thrown himself in front of Charles; he has no memory of deciding to do it, just of a torsion of every magnetic field in the room rippling over him in a disorienting, painful wave. Something bounces off his back. His ears are ringing. Erik can sense the screws and struts in the table and bed moving toward them: he stretches out a hand blindly and grips every metal item in the room. It’s much harder than it should be. He shoves until the fields are still and the metal is still, and he is quivering with effort. There is a gasp from behind him.

Charles lays bracing hands on his shoulders.

“Good god. That’s me told, isn’t it?” he says from a handspan away, looking both appalled and delighted. The expression on his face is exactly the same as it was twenty years ago, watching Sean explode the front room windows. Erik thinks again that Charles is exactly where he was meant to be. “Thank you, Genevieve,” Charles adds. He sends Erik a look of amused surprise, which is when Erik remembers that physical contact enhances his telepathy, so Charles will have caught his thought with particular clarity. He straightens, sighing.

The wall behind Charles is…rippled. The table is in splinters all over the floor. The bed is so much kindling.

Moving carefully, Genevieve bends over and picks up the book, shakes it free of bits of wood, and hugs it to her middle as though she can hold in that amazing power with it. “You _stopped_ it,” she whispers, staring at him. “How did you do that?”

She’s breathing raggedly, trying not to, trying to hide the shaking of her hands by clutching the book harder. He remembers Nina’s first few conscious attempts to wield her powers: her panic and confusion, the way she would curl into him for comfort only to jump away when her budding empathy tangled with her father’s worry and pride and desperate, terrified love. How relieved he had been when it began to focus on animals. He remembers himself, newly freed from Auschwitz, struggling to understand the new reach of powers that shook at him every waking moment and leapt to malignant life in his nightmares, magnified by the hollowness of having no purpose now that he was free, and utterly alone. Sorrow coils in his chest for the stupid, frightened boy he had been. For Charles, who never speaks of his childhood without making light of it. For this defiant, defensive girl across the room trying so hard not to give away how afraid she is of herself.

For Nina, who will never learn how much she might have been capable of.

For a moment he can’t breathe.

He ought to walk out of here. He could be in Canada by nightfall, Finland in three days: he could use one of his old safehouses and live on the edges of everything in perfect quiet, perfect silence. Erik rubs his brow hard, aware that Charles is watching him, that Charles is aware of all that is passing though his head at this moment and is restraining himself admirably.

“A month,” he rasps, and feels for a moment a bright, irresistible burst of pleasure-relief-sorrow-hope-affection-smugness wash through him, both goad and balm. It is dizzying. “ _Stop_ that, Charles.”

“Sorry,” Charles says, not meaning it in the slightest, and wipes at his eyes.

Genevieve swipes her nose with the back of her hand and heaves a gusty sigh. “I’ve hurt people,” she repeats angrily. The distinction between present and past tense isn’t lost on any of them.

He can feel Charles gathering himself for another smothering assault of sympathy and reassurance and altruism that will work just as well as it ever did on him, which is to say that perhaps in a few decades she will be able to listen.

“So have I,” Erik says, ignoring the startled noise the man beside him makes. No damned privacy at all. “I don’t plan to again. Do you?”

Genevieve shakes her head. She looks less than certain about that answer.

“I think that’s as good a place to start as any,” Erik says, and wonders if it will prove true.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short bridge-y bit of angst for the weekend.

For many years his most dreaded nightmare was of a coin he couldn’t move and a bullet he couldn’t stop. Later it became a bullet he should have stopped, _could_ have stopped: a different form of failure, much less forgivable, but the same wrenching sense of loss. The same effect—he would wake knotted with shame and rage, pace whatever room he was in until his breathing settled, move the coin (or the bullet) over his knuckles, try to sleep for another hour or two.

His worst dreams now aren’t about failure.

In them the arrow has a metal tip he can direct, or there is a metal button on his clothing he uses to deflect it from its path, or he miraculously discovers he can manipulate wood as well as metal, or a crow flies into its trajectory and dies instead, or his wife and child fall backwards before they can be struck, death sailing centimeters over their heads to lodge in a tree instead of their hearts (his heart).

From these dreams he wakes lightheaded with relief and elation and anger, until he reaches unthinking for Magda and the emptiness of the other half of the bed asserts itself with inarguable force.

Erik fights his way out of the blankets and sits on the edge of the mattress, waiting for the trembling to stop, for his pulse to slow.

 _Hope_ , Charles keeps insisting, as though hope is not the cruelest possible trick the heart can play on itself.

The knobs on the dresser twitch and hum at him. The pipes whisper. He can feel all the metal in the lower levels of the mansion waiting for his touch, waiting to be used. There is a thunderstorm approaching from the northwest, lighting up his metal-sense in synesthetic flashes. Magda’s sharp, bitten-off cry as she died had not been unlike her sharp, bitten-off cry their first time together, rushed and mortifyingly clumsy in a hostel in Austria: an astonished cough of sound as she fluttered and clenched around him, after which she wound her fingers into his hair and kissed his neck frantically, breathless and laughing.

The comparison is unendurable. Erik stands, wobbles, leans against the dresser. The metal leaps toward his hands. He breathes it back with effort and rubs at his sweaty temples.

 _Erik_ , Charles sends, a delicate touch. _Are you all right?_

 _Fine_ , Erik replies, forming the thought carefully and pushing it past his mental barriers. What is Charles doing up so late? _Go back to sleep._

 _Not likely_ , is what comes back, less clear than Charles usually is. With it comes a faint sense of discomfort centering in his lower back, and strange twinges of pain down his legs. A second later Charles’ presence grows dim and embarrassed and apologetic, and Erik realizes he wasn’t meant to see any of that. _Sorry,_ Charles adds, unnecessarily. _Phantom pain. It makes for the occasional difficult night. Not often._

 _Chess?_ Erik replies, before he can think himself out of it. Charles may even be distracted enough to miss the tangled mess that his mind is right now, that he is as much in need of a distraction as Charles is—but he doubts it.

 _Please_ , is the response, and Erik splashes water on his face and leaves the smothering confines of his room.


	8. Chapter 8

Genevieve Croll has the disposition of a sleep-deprived army nurse.

“I’m _trying_ ,” she snarls, in response to Erik’s (mild, he thought) suggestion that she should make more of an effort to _feel_ the reach of her powers in her physical body. “It’s not in there. It’s out…here.”

She waves in front of her, as though her mutation is floating at arm’s reach instead of flowing in her veins. Erik does not sigh, but he can’t help the hand he presses to his brow. She is giving him a headache. Genevieve scowls and tugs at her hair.

Her clothing today is more casual: a sweatshirt zipped all the way up to the hollow of her throat, pale jeans with ragged holes at the pockets and frayed knees. Bright purple socks that look too hot even for the cooler temperature of the lower level.

“It’s a part of you,” Erik says, perhaps not as patiently as he should. “It’s not _out there_. It’s in your bones, girl. It’s in your heartbeat. It reacts to your mental and emotional states. It defends you as surely as the reflex to put your hands in front of your face when someone throws something at your head. As long as you’re afraid of it, you’re afraid of yourself, and you won’t be able to control it.”

This goes over as well as he should have known it would: she spins on a heel and stalks over to the bed to slump in hunch-shouldered, sullen silence.

“This is fun,” she says with a brittle smile.

Isn’t it just.

He still can’t believe he let Charles talk him into this.

“Perhaps we should try again later,” Erik says.

“Oh no, gosh, can we please explore our feelings some more? I think there’s a real breakthrough waiting for me just around the corner. Maybe we could sing some Kumbaya first.” She tugs at her hair again. “I thought you were supposed to be all about weird-ass capes and smashing things up and scaring the crap out of people, not pushing dime-store psychotherapy.”

She reminds him achingly of Angel, who had perfect command of her wings but kept everyone at arm’s length with her snide attitude. She reminds him of Raven in the first few months after Cuba, furious at everything and everyone, covering her sorrow with caustic comments and fuming silences. She reminds him of…

Well. That isn’t a line of thought he wants to follow.

“We can do that if you want,” Erik says mildly, and stares Genevieve down when she glowers at him, bluff called. “Why don’t you start.”

Genevieve lifts her chin. “Age before beauty, _Magneto_.”

He bites the inside of his cheek against an aggravated smirk and folds onto the floor, because she has already ruined the chairs (again). One of his knees pops loudly. Genevieve shifts on the bed, pushing herself deeper into the mattress, closer to the wall: farther from him. One of her hands inevitably slides into her pocket, where that cheap folding knife waits for her restless fingers. Erik tips a palm toward the ceiling and grips the silverware from her late lunch, the steel balls from the perpetual motion toy on her desk, and the loose change and paperclips he always has in his pockets. He brings them into a slow orbit around his outstretched hand.

Genevieve’s eyes widen. Immediately she folds her arms and slouches more, to prove how unimpressed she is.

“Your turn.”

“You know I can’t do that,” his unwilling student snaps.

“I know you don’t dare to try,” he replies, beginning to lose patience, and also, paradoxically, to enjoy himself. “I know that if you don’t dare to try, you won’t learn what you can do, and you will never learn to control it: _it_ will control _you_. As it does right now, keeping you down here three floors from your peers, afraid your next bad dream will blow through a wall.”

Something about this strikes a nerve: several, if her stiffening spine and the sudden pressure against the fields in his metal-sense are a fair barometer of her anger.

“You don’t know shit,” she says, spacing every word out for emphasis.

The metal is beginning to slide out of his grip. He’s not sure what she’s doing, exactly, but it warps the magnetic fields he’s created. It raises the temperature in the room, too. He stretches his metal-sense to press against the vague shape of her power, and she hisses.

Interesting.

“I came here in 1962 only able to move metal objects a little bigger than I am, and I left a few months later able to pull a nuclear submarine up from the bottom of the ocean,” Erik says, not looking at her: whatever she’s doing is beginning to affect the metal still orbiting him, and he needs to pay attention. The perfect circular paths are becoming elliptical; the whole mass is moving toward him in miniscule increments. “I was using my anger to fuel my power, and it wasn’t enough. I suspect you’re discovering the same thing.”

“Wow,” Genevieve says softly. “Deep. So…where was it you learned to drop football stadiums on government buildings?”

He’s beginning to think Charles arranged this pairing as some sort of convoluted revenge.

“Solitary confinement,” Erik replies. With a flick of his fingers he sends the metal toward her, at a speed which would do considerable damage if he had any intention of letting it strike her. The sense of her power flexes and focuses: he ducks. All the metal objects embed themselves in the wall above him. Genevieve gapes at him from her perch on the bed, mute with outrage and trembling visibly.

“Like shielding your face with your hands,” he says, raising an eyebrow.

“ _Fucker_ ,” Genevieve growls. But there is an undertone of resignation in it that tells him they have someplace to start now.

“Fair enough,” Erik says, and gets to his feet, brushing himself off. “We should take this somewhere you don’t plan on sleeping, I think.”

When he makes for the door, he isn’t sure she’ll follow, but he walks like he expects her to anyway.

Somewhat to his surprise, she does.

 

* * *

 

 

“How’s she doing?” Charles asks, accosting him on his way to his room. The tiny quirk of his mouth suggests he already has a fair idea how Genevieve is doing, and how Erik is doing too. Erik is irritated and a little embarrassed to realize he needs a shower after working with the girl—something about her power strains his grip on his own in ways he hasn’t experienced since he was much younger, and much weaker.

“She’s charming.”

“Isn’t she just,” Charles says fondly, as though Genevieve is a bad-tempered but adorable kitten in need of a bowl of milk and a lap. Something about his tone makes Erik think of Charles’ seemingly boundless enthusiasm for his company in the days after Miami and his failed attempt to kill Shaw; how utterly, bewilderingly impervious that enthusiasm had been to Erik’s total disinterest in making friends.

Not a parallel worth drawing.

“Oh no, definitely not,” Charles deadpans, dry as sand. When Erik cuts him a sideways glance, the not-smile is trying to stretch into a grin.

“Fuck off, Charles,” Erik mutters, and retreats behind his door (and when did he start thinking of it as his door, dammit), doing his best to ignore Charles’ quiet laughter.

A month of this and he will probably find prison appealing.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaand back to the angst. Also Peter (finally). And Raven, because the world needs more Raven badassery in it.

Evening at the school is a slow-receding tide of chaos. Students kicking soccer balls on the lawn and necking unsubtly in the bushes, arguing over television channels, sneaking sweets from the cupboards. Testing their powers against each other in hushed, snickering stand-offs that occasionally require fire extinguishers, and muttering over their homework in the lounge and the game room, and calling their parents from the classroom phones—those who have parents they want to call, and who wish to speak with them.

Erik has learned that this benign anarchy will part and reform around him if he pretends not to notice it, but it still takes more nerve than he prefers to admit to needing, to remain on the first floor when classes are finished. Certainly it takes more patience than he thought he possessed.  

He is trying to fix a broken radio in a classroom, twisting tiny screws with fingers and power. His metal-sense is stretched and sore in a pleasant way, like the ache of muscles after a hard run. Genevieve is still a stubborn, prickly challenge, but tonight she has deigned to take an upstairs room. She refuses to socialize, though, preferring her books. She can stare the most effusive of her fellow students into silence. She is probably doing just that from where he left her sitting in the library, fingering her rusty pocket knife and scowling at Heinlein’s _Stranger in a Strange Land_.

 She’s a mirror he has little choice but to stare into these days, and it makes him irritable.

No doubt Charles finds all of this very amusing.

“Hey man, I hear you’re, like, sticking around and teaching and shit,” someone says from right behind him. All the screws leap into the air, as do three fountain pens with aluminum shells and a letter opener. The boy—man? He is older than the others by a decade—has appeared out of nowhere. “Woah,” he says, raising palms, staring at the pens. “Easy, dude.”

Silver hair, lanky height, that ridiculous jacket…

 “You broke me out of the Pentagon,” Erik says. A soft gasp from the direction of the door makes them both turn. Three children peer around the threshold with identical expressions of fascinated horror. They freeze when they realize they’ve been spotted.

“Get outta here, weirdos, or I’ll tell the Prof you volunteered to clean the living room,” the kid yells, and then the door is shut and he is standing in a different place, and the air displacement ruffles the drapes. Amazing. “So I’m Peter,” the kid says. “You’re Magneto, or Erik? Whatever. Nicetameetcha, blah blah, except we did sort of meet already. Yeah, that was a trip, man. Never did something like that before. Though I gotta say, I would probably have left you there if I’d known what you were going to do.”

“Good judgment,” Erik mutters. Peter grins. Erik brings the screws back, lets the pens fall to the desk, and, not examining the impulse, spins the letter opener in place for a moment before sending it into the map on the opposite wall.

“Well, you said you knew crazy. I guess I should’ve listened.”

Erik doesn’t remember exactly what he’d said: he’d been too busy trying not to vomit all over the elevator. “You more than made up for it,” he replies, because Peter was in Cairo as well, ferrying Raven as close as it was possible to get to him, fighting En Sabah Nur. Getting his leg broken. He still wears a light brace over his blue jeans. It evidently hasn’t slowed him down very much. What a marvelous power.

Far more use against an arrow than the ability to move metal.

He goes back to the radio, using a screwdriver and his hands because this way he doesn’t have to hold a conversation. But Peter just stands there, watching him work. Erik chews on the tip of his tongue and doesn’t stare forbiddingly. One Genevieve is enough for this school.

“I was wondering if you, uh. If maybe. Um. I got a—thing—oh shitsickles, look, _here_.”

Erik does look, unable not to after _shitsickles_. The kid is cupping a simple white candle in a glass holder, half offering it, half sheltering it as though Erik will glare it to pieces. It’s unlit. There is nothing about it that would suggest why it should belong to him.

He sets the screwdriver down. Peter scans his face, doesn’t seem to find what he was looking for, and heaves a sigh. “I got it in the city,” he mumbles. “The lady told me it’ll burn for a full day and that it was, er, blessed? It’s a, it’s a, a yarz—a yahtzee—a yarzeet? _Yahrzeit_. Shit, man. This was a horrible idea, I shouldn’t’ve—Here.”

He sets the candle on the desk and backs up. “I’m gonna go. Just”—he waves a little wildly—“forget I did this, okay?”

“ _Wait_.” He doesn’t think Peter will, but when he picks up the candle Peter is still there, half-turned toward him but looking at the ceiling, shoulders hunching toward his ears.

“I dunno,” Peter sighs. He rubs a hand through all that silver hair. “I thought, for your wife and kid maybe you’d want to—yeah, and it was dumb, wasn’t it.”

“Not dumb,” Erik says, blinking. He had not sat shiva for them. (He had made the whole world sit shiva for them.) It’s too late for a yahrzeit candle, too early by two days for shloshim, and he stopped believing in the possibility of a merciful god nearly a month ago in Poland with his child and wife lying bloody and empty in his arms, or more than thirty years ago in Poland with his mother lying bloody and empty at his feet. Or any number of moments in between. But the glass is cool and smooth against his palm, and the clench of sorrow inside him is somehow less terrible a weight than it was a moment ago.

Peter straightens out of that painful-looking stance. “If it’s cool with you, I thought maybe I could stick around for this? I tried to learn the words from the lady in the shop. But I can go! I mean, if you want! It’s just. Uh. Ahem. Well. Your daughter…was sort of…family.”

He’s still too surprised for anger, though he thinks he might get there. But the kid doesn’t look like he’s joking, or being metaphorical: he looks, in fact, as though he might be sick.

“Last name Maximoff,” Peter says, looking him in the eye, and Erik’s hands go abruptly numb.

He remembers the boy in the Pentagon elevator, the young man in the wasteland of Cairo. The look on his face. The things he said. He’d wondered, and then decided not to wonder: it would have been such a cruel twist of fate, more so for Peter than for him. Who would want to learn that their absent father had caused so much destruction? Who would ever want to know that man?

“I—” he says, and finds he doesn’t actually have any other words. All the muscles in his chest are tightening. The impulse to leave is overwhelming. But this gesture deserves better than that. Peter’s bravery does. “I didn’t know,” Erik finishes, and winces, hearing the words.

“Yeah, no, I know that. My mom only told me after Washington.”

Erik winces again.

“Can I,” Peter says, glancing toward the candle. “I don’t know if—is it okay? Are there, you know, um. Rules?”

 _Immediate family_ , comes the answer from some long-unexamined corner of his memories. But he’s followed so few of his childhood traditions strictly in his life, this is hardly the time to start. Then it occurs to him that Peter _is_ immediate family, and he has to brace himself against the desk.

Peter takes the silence as an invitation: he approaches slowly, slides a Zippo lighter from a pocket. Erik clears his throat, holds the candle out.

“I’m gonna fuck it up.”

“I probably am too.”

Peter huffs nervous laughter and touches the flame to the wick. They stare at it in silence. The sun is setting in the windows. Outside the room someone shrieks laughter, and there are several shouts. Erik draws a breath so large it feels like it splits something in his chest.

“ _Yizkor elohim nish’mas imi mo rösi Nina…_ ”

They stumble through the first part of the prayer in fits and starts, Peter mangling the Hebrew with a bizarre blend of mispronunciations and American accent, Erik fumbling for the words after so long, and the breath with which to speak them. He doesn’t attempt the second part of the prayer, as much for his own sake as for Peter’s: he has nothing to say about the fiction of an all-merciful god in his profound compassion.

“Hey,” Peter says in time. It’s gotten quiet on the first floor. There is another swoosh of displaced air, and Peter places a crumpled ball of napkins in Erik’s hand.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry, I mean—fuck. What a crappy thing to say, _sorry_ , you lose your wife and your little girl and here I am—”

“No.” What a fine impression he must be making. Though he supposes it can’t possibly be worse than the impressions he’s already made. “It’s fine. Thank you for this. It was…perfect.”

Peter’s smile is small and crooked and lovely, a little foolish with relief.

“I’m going to get some air,” Erik says, and pushes on in spite of the sudden flutter of nerves in his stomach, afraid Peter will think he wasn’t welcome after all, that this strange, fragile ceremony and the lengths Peter has gone to to make it happen weren’t… He doesn’t have a word for what they were in any language he knows, actually. “But if you want, I—if you are willing, I mean, I’d like to— _verdammt_.”

“Looks like I got my way with words from your side,” Peter says, surprising Erik into a snort of something like laughter. “Yeah, you know, I’d like that, I think? I mean, I’m twenty six and you’re what, fifty, and I steal shit and you almost ended the world like a couple of times, so I don’t—I just—shit. I’m not trying to replace what you _had_ , man, and _I_ don’t need—ugh shut up Peter. This went so much better in my head. But maybe we could just…hang. If you’re sticking around for a while.”

“Hang,” Erik echoes. “Yes. Anything you want. —Excuse me, please.”

At which point he caps the wonderful impression he’s made on his son ( _son, Mein Gott, son_ circling in his head like a flight of panicked birds) by all but scrambling out of the room toward the nearest door that leads outside.

He makes it to the edge of the fountain before he has to stop. He wishes he’d thought to bring that ridiculous crumple of napkins. He can’t remember the last time he cried like this, this wretched, airless compression of every muscle in his body, as though grief is a poison it can expel. Many years; before the camps. It goes on far too long, and there is nothing he can do about it but crouch on the cold flagstones and fight to be quiet. He is lightheaded and gasping when he is able straighten and sit on the stone lip of the fountain. His lungs ache. His breath still comes in hitches. He’s grateful it’s dark.

“So I’m guessing he finally got up the guts to tell you,” Raven says from somewhere in the topiary to his left. Erik jerks and curses. Raven comes close enough that he can see the faint gleam of starlight on her blue skin. That she can probably see how wrecked he is, if she didn’t already get an eyeful. How long has she been standing there?

“Raven, leave me alone.”

She snorts and sits next to him, curling one leg beneath her. Erik thinks briefly about levitating out of the garden; out of New York altogether. Off the continent. Instead he sits in brittle silence as Raven pulls one of his hands into both of hers and leans against him, aware that he may shatter like warped glass when she finds the words for whatever it is she wants to say to him.

“You’re kind of a dick, you know,” Raven says.

Erik, braced for something else entirely, coughs in surprise and turns his head to catch the profile of her face: she looks at him sidelong, then away again, and shrugs. “But then, so is he, in a much less intense and weirdly sweet sort of way, so. Apple, tree.”

He can’t think of anything to say at all.

But Raven has seldom required responses to her side of any given conversation, so he doesn’t even try to come up with a reply, and after a moment she sighs. “I never thought I’d leave here, when I was little,” she murmurs, staring out at the far spot where the trees begin. “It was the first home I ever had, the only one I’ve ever really had—though if you tell Charles I said that, I will smother you in your sleep. Then I left, and I never thought I’d come back. It’s probably time for me to start thinking I’ll never win the lottery, huh?”

“Try thinking you’ll never see a world where our people can live safely in the open. Charles has plenty of money.”

She huffs a soft laugh. “I used to think exactly that. I thought I’d be fighting my whole life, and that I’d bite it still halfway up that hill with all my friends dead and no end in sight. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Doubts?”

She squints at the treeline. “I prefer to think of it as maturity,” she says drily. “But it’s nice that you can still poke sticks at people in the state you’re in.”

Erik decides the treeline is indeed fascinating. He wants to wipe his face, but not with Raven holding onto him, and in this strange, argumentative mood. “You ought to know that by now.”

“I don’t know that this is a state I’ve ever seen you in, actually. But I know you well enough to know you’re going to wake up tomorrow wanting to run.” He opens his mouth, to say what he has no idea. She shakes at him, gone tense and deadly as a snake. “Don’t you do that to those kids, Erik. Peter and Genevieve deserve better. Charles does. I know this heavy emotional shit is like gargling battery acid for you, but don’t you fucking dare do that. _Stick it out_.”

He would snap at her—the words are already on his tongue—but…it’s fair. He sighs. “Not right now, no. But this isn’t is a life I can live forever, Raven.”

Raven relaxes into him again. “Good,” she says. “Though FYI, I’m not exactly turning into a librarian here. They’re going to be a hell of a team, these kids, once they pull their heads out of their asses. They’re learning to fight for themselves _and_ each other. We got Genevieve out. Kurt was incredible. You might find more in common with this place than you expect, once you think to start looking.”

Erik frowns, placing that information with his sometime-student’s recalcitrance, her need for physical space, her sharp-tongued defiance and her penchant for long sleeves. That knife. “How badly was she hurt?”

 “It wasn’t pretty. It never is, is it? If she wants to tell you about it, she will.”

Also fair. He’s unused to this new Raven, confident and comfortable with herself, still so beautifully driven but no longer unbalanced by her outrage at the unfairness of the world. She doesn’t leave him much room for argument.

“Gargling battery acid,” he mutters, and she laughs softly.

“You really are horrible at it, Erik.”

He shifts, deciding the discomfort of tears cooling on his face is in fact a little more important than his pride, and rubs the sleeve of his shirt under his eyes. “I wasn’t,” he says quietly. “I don’t think I was. For a little while, at least.”

Raven’s breath catches. She squeezes his hand. “I wish I could have met them.”

The knot in his throat makes speech impossible. He hums a faint agreement—smiles a little, because Magda and Raven would have sat down at a table together like two lionesses staring at one another over a kill and been old friends by the second drink. They would have traded stories of all the idiotic things Erik has done and laughed until they were leaning against each other, and he would have drowned his confusion and relief and joy in perhaps one too many shots of cheap Soviet vodka, and Nina would have been fascinated with Raven’s ability to shift, demanding demonstration after demonstration.

He wipes his face again. The ache of missing them is all through him. “You would have gotten along very well.”

Raven wraps her arms around him, pulls his head down to press a kiss to his temple.

“I know,” she says, the words puffing into his hair. “I’m awesome.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: I've had only peripheral experiences with Jewish mourning traditions, and my research was admittedly pretty cursory; apologies for anything I got wrong.


	10. Chapter 10

After weeks of Charles’ gracious nagging and guilt trips, and one very long night watching a candle burn, Erik has somehow ended up lurking just outside the dining room during breakfast.

This has nothing to do with Peter, of course. Peter will set all the terms of their spending time together: he isn’t going to push. (He wouldn’t know how, honestly. His son is a grown man, and a rather odd one at that.) He has simply decided it’s time to stop “skulking in the kitchen at odd hours” and acknowledge in a more formal way that he will remain here until he’s finished…finished…

Whatever.

He regrets this decision before the dining room is even in view.

Students of all ages lounge in chairs and on the window seats, move between the tables much too quickly with their hands full of food and cutlery. Whispering and shouting and fighting over French toast. Levitating the flatware. Rio in Carnival without the wine and more obvious forms of license. The noise level is remarkable. He knew objectively that there were close to thirty students living here, but seeing them all at once is daunting, to put it mildly. He’s mapping out the quickest escape route when Hank McCoy, of all people, catches sight of him and indicates an empty seat across from Ororo, who looks radiantly happy as she argues with a student about something.

“Mr. Lehnsherr!” Jean Gray calls, and waves him toward a chair next to her, only to frown when a young boy with pinkish skin and a shock of orange hair slides into it, aware of nothing but the stack of pancakes on his plate.

“ _Entschuldigen sie, Herr Lehnsherr, guten morgen_ ,” someone says timidly from behind him. Hearing one of his childhood languages in this place makes him freeze: he turns to meet the eyes of the blue-skinned teleporter from Cairo. Kurt. Who helped Raven get Genevieve out of wherever she was.

“ _Guten morgen_ ,” Erik replies, and is alarmed to realize he sounds just as bewildered as he feels. Kurt smiles a shy white smile with very sharp-looking teeth, then vanishes in a _poof_ and a spreading cloud of blue.

Now that he’s been noticed, a retreat will look exactly like what it is. He sucks in a fortifying breath and marches into the chaos, trying not to draw parallels with the countless times he did this while leading the Brotherhood. He does momentarily miss the cape. It provided a nice sense of purpose. Charles had better not be listening in right now.

Jean shoves the pink boy over and waves again. Deciding that all options will be equally excruciating, and he did, after all, choose this, Erik makes his way over and pulls the offered chair back. There are three other mutants at the table besides Jean and the pink boy, and all of them fall silent as he sits. He doesn’t think he’s imagining the drop in volume in the rest of the room, either.

“Hi, Mr. Lehnsherr,” Jean says. “Do you want breakfast?”

She slides the serving platter in the center of the table toward him. It’s stacked with toast, a cooling yellow pile of scrambled eggs, grapes, and shriveling slices of cantaloupe. He’s glad he’s not hungry. But they are staring at him with breathless curiosity, all five of them, so Erik pulls a bare plate from the setting next to him and selects two slices of toast. He lifts a fork and knife from farther down and holds a hand out for them to settle on. It seems easier than asking. A kid across the table with no obvious physical mutation utters a little _oooh!_ noise of admiration.

“Cool power,” the pink boy says with a nod of magnificent nonchalance. Then he makes a face, gasps, and sneezes. His pancakes catch on fire.

“Oh _Tamin_ ,” Jean cries, and slaps a napkin over the flames. It also catches fire. The blond girl on the other side of Tamin stands and spits: hissing foam suddenly covers the burning plate, the table around it, and most of Tamin. Erik can only blink and release silverware all over the room, which he’d reached for in surprise.

“ _Uuuggghhh_ ,” Tamin moans, clawing at his face. “Gross. Gross! Sherry, _why_.”

“Quick thinking,” Erik says. Sherry nods and sits back down to finish her orange juice.

“Bless you,” says a girl across the table in a tiny voice.

Jean starts to giggle. So does everyone else. Tamin wipes his face with the tablecloth, making horrified growling noises though his laughter. Erik rests his chin in his hand, a smile tugging at his mouth which he doesn’t quite manage to fight. All the kids relax visibly.

He would give anything, anything at all to have Nina here giggling with them.

“Did you really go to school here, Mr. Magneto?” the other boy asks.

“Mr. _Lehnsherr_ ,” Jean mutters with a glare.

“Mhm.” They all stare: apparently this isn’t an acceptable reply. “It wasn’t a school back then,” Erik says. “More of a training camp. But yes. A long time ago.”

“Did you have to do phys-ed?” Tamin says glumly. “I bet you didn’t.”

“Physical training improves concentration and mental discipline.” He sounds like the most boring of teachers. He makes up for this by taking a bite of the toast and waving the remainder in a tiny circle, like a conductor. “I ran five miles around the estate every morning and lifted weights in the afternoon.”  

Tamin looks alarmed. “You’re not going to teach phys-ed here, are you?”

“No.”

“Phew.”

“Do you good, fireboy,” says Sherry, her words stretched by the deep twang of the American south.

“It’s _Dragon Man_.”

Hopefully McCoy has made plenty of those breath mints.

Erik eats the second slice of toast, though it is tasteless and soggy with butter. The children chatter at one another around him, jabs and jokes about their powers and the unfortunate epithet _Dragon Man_ , which Tamin will likely reconsider when he gets older; complaints about homework, whispered speculation about Raven’s abysmally named danger room. Jean, old enough to stay above this but young enough to find it amusing, toys with her food and smiles. Erik lets their bickering wash over him, decides to try the eggs. The knots in his shoulders are starting to loosen.

“Well what’re _you_ gonna be, huh, Sherry? Loogie Girl?”

“Just Sherry,” Sherry says stolidly. “The name my mama gave me’s good enough.”

“Hah!”

“No, no,” says Joseph, who has been carefully rearranging his food into some geometric shape. “You gotta have a code name. Right, Mag…er” —he ducks under Jean’s glare —“right, uh, Mr. Lehnsherr? Code names are cool.”

Then they are all waiting for him to speak.

“They have their uses,” Erik says carefully. He is precisely the worst person they should be asking this question of. Beside him Jean casts him a sidelong knowing stare that reminds him so much of Charles’ he has to twitch away his irritation. She can hardly help herself, though he wishes she would: there is nothing in his head she ought to be seeing. “But,” he adds, “the name my mother gave me is good enough for me, too. You should never let a name, even one you choose for yourself, allow you to forget where you came from.”

The little girl across the table pokes at her food with a troubled expression. “Is that what you did,” she mumbles to her plate. She immediately shrinks down on herself, twisting her hands together over her fork.

Silence again. Even unflappable Sherry’s eyes have widened. It’s a bizarre relief to have it spoken of, Erik finds. Other than Genevieve the few students he’s encountered make such an obvious effort at normalcy it only underscores the fact that they know they have a fugitive among them, a man who has done some terrible things in the name of their safety. Things which on occasion have made them much less safe.

“ _Liebling_ —” Erik sighs. Saying it hurts. Talking to children, filtering his responses for them in the way he had slowly learned to do for Nina, fills him with tired longing. She is afraid, though, and he is why. He draws a breath, thinks. “I did it many times, over many years,” he says to her lowered face. “Until I had all but forgotten myself.”

“But now you remember,” Jean says with that confidence that makes telepaths completely insufferable.

Young Jean has yet to learn that what she gleans from someone’s mind may have little to do with their actions: it’s something he suspects most telepaths have some difficulty with. Still, he considers it. “I suppose I am trying to.”

“ _Classes_ ,” says Charles from behind him, and the children jump guiltily. It’s only force of will that keeps Erik from joining them: he didn’t even notice the chair approaching. The dining room has all but emptied. He didn’t notice that, either. “Hop to, boy and girls, or you’ll be late. Jean, don’t forget training this afternoon.”

“Yes, Professor,” Jean sighs, and gets up. “Thanks, Mr. Lehnsherr.” She leaves before Erik can ask what in hell he’s being thanked for.

“This was a terrible idea,” he mutters.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Charles says easily. “Though I suspect you’ve only reinforced Tamin’s penchant for the dramatic, and we’ll all pay for that somehow. They’re curious. Yours is a perspective they’ve not had. Do you want coffee? We’ve learned to hide it in one of the staff rooms: caffeine seems to heighten some of the students’ powers in unpredictable ways.”

Coffee would be good, actually. Charles, no doubt reading that answer, moves toward the other end of the room. His chair is different today, sleek and motorized, with big X-shaped chrome spokes on the wheels: subtle. Charles doesn’t have much room to throw stones on the subject of drama.

“Hank designed it, not me,” Charles says drily.

“You could have objected.”

“I did, actually. It availed me nothing. Hank has developed some fairly strong opinions about symbolism, among other things.” Charles accepts the cup Erik offers and stretches, placing his free hand low on his spine. Erik remembers the sensation of phantom pain, and wonders if Charles can feel the pressure of his own fingers. He flinches away from the thought. He busies himself with adding cream, finishes to find Charles staring at him exactly the way Jean did earlier. “Ask,” Charles says, with a little lift of the brows.

“You don’t seem to need me to,” Erik says. “And I’ve no right.”

The face Charles makes could be taken for either impatience or scorn, it’s difficult to tell. “The injury was to my spinal cord between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae,” he says, horribly clinical. “It wasn’t complete: for a while the doctors held out some hope I might one day be able to walk with braces, but that hasn’t turned out to be the case. Though I’ve retained voluntary organ function, for which I am very grateful.” He gestures with the cup. “There’s some limited sensation around and below it, so yes, I do in fact feel pressure, but there is none in my legs. You didn’t shoot me, Erik.”

“I _might as_ _well have_ ,” Erik snarls. The spoon has twisted into a knot in his fingers. He shakes it onto the countertop, turns to the window and takes a gulp of the coffee, swallowing back the sudden, bitter force of his anger. “Don’t—don’t, Charles.”

“If you mean don’t forgive you, you’re too late by more than half a decade,” Charles says, so lightly it only emphasizes what the words must cost him. “I ought to have done it sooner, but, well. It took me a while to think clearly on the subject, I’m afraid.”

Erik coughs out a mirthless bark. “I can’t imagine why.”

“I mean it. Moira fired, you deflected the bullet, and I was in its path. I don’t hold you any more responsible for that than I do her: neither of you intended what happened. I’ll even allow that you probably didn’t know I was in the audience when you dropped part of a football stadium on me ten years later, which also took some time to get over, incidentally. But then, I never once looked into the possibility of your innocence in the matter of President Kennedy’s murder, and I should have. I was too ready to believe the worst. I’m sorry for that, Erik, truly.”

The coffee tastes sour. Erik sets it aside. “You have nothing to apologize for, Charles.”

But he had waited, at first. Solitude had never bothered him before: he’d spent most of his life after leaving Germany in his own company, had always found it easier than trying to dampen the intensity of his focus and his rage to make others comfortable. Charles’ companionship, Raven and Alex and Sean and Hank’s—even Azazel and Emma and Janos and Angel’s—had weakened him in ways he’d not guessed. The absence of any metal or electromagnetic fields had been a deafening silence, disorienting and terrifying, like losing his sight or his sense of touch. He had paced the walls in a blind, helpless daze, reliving the cell in Auschwitz in nauseating detail, hating everyone who had put him there or forgotten him there or made him know again what it was to be alone.

Erik draws a few even breaths. Charles’ gaze is steady but too bright when he finds the courage to turn back around face him.

“You’re not, you know,” Charles says steadily. “Not now.”

It’s somewhere between threat and promise: entirely Charles.

“I know,” Erik murmurs.


	11. Chapter 11

“Try again,” says Erik, and Genevieve flings him a look that would bore through granite if it were solid. In the next instant she is stony-faced and stiff-backed, a gaunt soldier in some lost war, staring down the target Erik has placed in front of a pine tree at the western corner of the estate. She spends much of her energy, he has learned, trying to appear disinterested in things.

“That tree’s going to be toast.”

“Kindling,” Erik replies. “Not toast. And it’ll be dead before winter, which is why I chose it. Look at the way the needles have browned.”

Genevieve squints at the tree and heaves the heavy sigh of the put-upon, specialty of teenagers and Raven when she is tolerating one of Charles’ more egregious fits of optimism. She raises her hand. As her power forms around it, his metal-sense explodes into vivid life. The target explodes into sawdust; the tree behind it begins to splinter apart at the base. Genevieve grunts, then gasps as the air around her begins to warp and shiver. She has learned to aim, but her control over the intensity of her power is very uneven.

“Breathe,” Erik commands, and reaches a hand out to set it above hers. He knows better than to touch her. He wraps his power gently over the slippery, toroidal field she has created, which he can sense but not replicate—how it works he’s not yet sure, it’s not quite what he can do, but it’s close, in some difficult-to-define way—and she utters another, harder grunt. “Don’t stop. Keep breathing. Focus on the base of the tree.”

He has to remember to breathe himself: containing her power still leaves him winded and beaded with sweat.

“Wha—?” Genevieve grits.

“Bring it down. You’re halfway there already, do it.”

She stiffens into one long line of outrage: she hates to be surprised. “Go on, then,” Erik says, with just enough impatience to piss her off. It’s not a tactic he’s really applied before in this kind of moment.

It works a little better than he anticipated. Genevieve utters a wordless snarl and the field he has in an uncertain grip expands, then slides out of his precarious hold. Suddenly his hand over hers is hot and prickling, a disturbing sensation like thousands of pinchers plucking at his skin from the inside. The sleeve of his shirt shreds. His metal-sense sings and shudders, and the buttons on his clothes vibrate. There is an oppressive sense of pressure forming around him: it feels like he might catch fire at any moment.

Erik hisses a curse and _shoves_ with his power. 

It snaps back, a feeling like a hard kick to the gut, except everywhere. The dying pine explodes from trunk to top with a sound like artillery fire. Erik snatches his hand back and loses his balance with his metal-sense grasping wildly at every field for miles around. His knees choose this moment to buckle, and he sits hard enough to drive the breath from him. Genevieve’s pocket knife tears a hole in her jeans and attaches itself to his chest.

“Oh _no_ ,” Genevieve moans, and leans over to smack him repeatedly in the head and shoulders.

A moment later he realizes she is trying to brush splinters off him. They are flying in sticky, pine-scented clouds all around. He raises an arm to stop this. She makes a noise somewhere between a sob and a growl and clamps onto his wounded wrist and his collar. The pain surprises him almost as much as her willing touch: he jerks backward and falls entirely flat, pulling Genevieve to her knees in the process.

“All right, I’m fine, _stop doing that_.” That last bit comes out sharper than he intended, but Genevieve is now pulling at his shirt, for some reason.

“You have my knife!”

There’s enough panic edging her words to kill his irritation instantly. He flattens a hand to his chest, feels the rusty steel clinging to him, and makes an effort to release it. It takes an embarrassing several seconds to do so. Something else rattles. There is more metal attached to him, small round things. What a good thing he didn’t choose to conduct today’s training closer to the house: he’d be bristling with fountain pens and silverware.

“Here,” Erik sighs, and Genevieve snatches the knife from him like it means survival. She slides into an uncomfortable-looking crouch in the grass, still looming over him, mostly because he is not yet sure he can get up.

She sniffs. Scrubs at her face. Sniffs again.

 _Verdammt_.

“It’s…all right?” Erik says, squinting at the sky.

“No it’s _not_ ,” she snarls back.

How, he wonders, does Charles manage to say these things and sound like he believes them? It’s not a skill he’s ever possessed. “No, it’s not,” he says instead, because he is fairly certain it’s too late in his life to start offering meaningless platitudes. “But neither of us is dead.”

Genevieve brushes splinters out of her hair with one hand. The other is turning the pocket knife over and over, thumb rubbing staccato circles into the cheap steel. “You’re bleeding,” she tells him.

He looks at his left hand. Blisters are forming on the back of it; tiny cuts adorn his palm and wrist. The knuckles are already swelling, and the skin from halfway down his forearm to his fingertips has acquired a purplish tinge that suggests things will be far more painful in a few hours, when the bruises set in. There isn’t much blood. “Mmhm,” he says, and sits up.

Genevieve turns away from him, hunched over herself like a gargoyle, every visible muscle knotted. She heaves a rough sigh and swipes at her face again.

“I’m fine,” Erik repeats. “That was my fault. I shouldn’t have surprised you.”

“How did I—” she gulps and clutches the knife. “How did I do the metal thing.”

“The what?”

“The…”she waves at him. Which is when he realizes the metal stuck to him is from his clothing. The button-down shirt is now gaping open over his tee shirt, and his jeans no longer have a button or a zipper. She’s not in much better a state, though thankfully her turtleneck had no buttons. Still, her hair is a splinter-laced snarl, and his is surely no better. They must look like a pair of teenagers just come from a particularly strenuous and ill-conceived tryst in a lumber mill.

Erik utters a surprised huff of laughter at that thought, scowls it away in the next instant, and pushes himself farther upright.

“That was me,” he says with as much dignity as he can manage. “I tried to push against the field you’d created. Apparently I pushed too hard.”

“Oh.”

She is still turning the knife over in her palm. He sets one finger on the steel, careful to keep the movement slow. Genevieve stills, looks him in the face: hers is strained and very young. “As coping mechanisms go, this isn’t bad,” Erik says quietly. “But it will only get you so far. I assume Charles has spoken with you about other options.”

Her fingers clutch at the knife, but she doesn’t get up and storm off, which is progress of a sort. “Yeah? So what do _you_ do?” she spits.

Erik rubs his head. Clouds of powdered pine rain out of his hair. “I provide an excellent cautionary tale about poor coping mechanisms,” he murmurs. Genevieve snorts, shakes her head and shoves herself unsteadily to her feet. “I meditate,” he adds grudgingly. “It does help. Most of the time.”

She stiffens. “No. _He_ tried to make me—no, _fuck_ this, no.”

 _Gott im Himmel,_ what a dreadful mirror this girl is. His own memories crowd him, clammy and strangling, echoed in her clenched fists and jaw, throbbing wildly in his pulse. He has no desire to touch anyone else’s pain. But she is still standing there, in all her angles and anger, her thin arms wrapping around her middle in that pitiful holding-in gesture.

“Charles tried to make you?” This doesn't seem likely.

“ _No_. Fuck. It wasn’t—I mean—fuck!”

“Don’t tell me anything if you don’t want to. I’m not asking.”

He is, though, even if he doesn’t mean to: right now, in the state of panicked fury she is in, he’s asking just by being here, a witness to her attempts to calm herself. He remembers all too well how he reacted to sympathy at such moments. She is entitled to her rage. It makes her stronger.

But she is also still crying, and clearly furious with herself for that.

“I was taken to Auschwitz when I was ten years old,” Erik says slowly. Genevieve’s eyes meet his for a raw second, then her head lowers until her hair hangs in her face. “I was there for almost two years. My powers came the day that I walked through the gates, and from that point on, I was a Nazi lab rat.”

A shudder travels over Genevieve’s thin frame. Erik gets to his feet, grunts at the way his button-less, zipper-less jeans try to sink. He slides his arms out of the shirt and ties the long sleeves firmly around his waist.

“Fashion statement,” Genevieve mutters.

“Yes, as you know fashion is my primary concern.”

“The magenta theme you had going on for a while there was concerning, all right.”

“You’re hilarious, Genevieve.”

They head toward the path that will take them to the mansion. Genevieve rubs the knife, stops, holds it in a fist—pulls it out, rubs it again. Endless little circles. She walks on her toes like an animal ready to flee at the slightest hint of threat. “He left it on a shelf,” she says after a while, staring at a point in the distance. Her voice is a little high, but she is steady. “Across the room where they—where I was. I couldn’t get to it, I was, I was tied to the wall. It was one of the games. If I could move the knife, I could have it. I tried all the time. But I never moved the knife.”

The echo of that is bad, a queasy clench like the second before throwing up. Erik breathes, stuffs his hands in his pockets to prevent himself from doing something idiotic like patting her shoulder. “That’s not how your power works,” he says, instead of _where is he, where were your parents, he deserves to die and I can kill him for you_.

“Well I know that _now_.”

“For me it was a coin. He wanted me to move a coin. And when I couldn’t, he ki…” He’s horrified to hear his voice thin out halfway through the word. He draws another, slower breath. “When I couldn’t move the coin, he killed my mother.”

They reach the edge of the lawn in a silence that doesn’t demand any more words. Genevieve no longer moves like she is fighting the urge to run: now her shoulders are curved forward over her chest. There’s a whiffle-ball game in progress on the side lawn, the younger children wielding ridiculously large plastic bats and shouting, not appearing to follow any clear set of rules. Peter is presiding, which likely explains the chaos. Joseph straddles the pitcher’s plate, tossing multiple balls, then making them soar into the sky on tiny explosions. Tamin waits on first base, bouncing on his toes.

Even at this distance the sight of Peter’s silvery tangle of hair, his wide, careless grin, causes a pang of confused amazement that steals Erik’s breath.

“Fucker,” Genevieve declares as they are making their way up to the mansion. She might mean Erik, or her tormentor, or Shaw, or the world in general. Probably all of them.

“You use that word a lot. You should mix it up now and then.”

“That word applies a lot.” She folds her arms. “You said something when you fell over that probably wasn’t any better. What was that, German?” He cuts a sidelong look at her, recognizing a deliberate change of subject. “It sounded like…gah cracken often yah? I bet it was worse than fucker. What did it mean?”

Erik pauses on one of the steps. He doesn’t remember saying it, but even hearing Genevieve’s badly mangled interpretation pulls at old, old memories, so old they are more faded sensations than coherent experience. “ _Gai kaken ofn yam,”_ he corrects wonderingly. “It’s Yiddish. My father used to say it. It means ‘go shit in the ocean’.”

Genevieve utters a startled, pealing yip of laughter, the first he has ever heard from her. He realizes he’s smiling, scowls again. She shakes her head and swipes one more time at her face, which is streaked with wood pulp and tear tracks. “I’m going to use that,” she says. “I like that.”

“Feel free. It does have more color than _fucker_.”

“You just haven’t used that one in the right moment yet.” She eyes his hand, which is still leaking sluggish blood and has swollen badly, and walks a little faster. “Sorry about your hand. I told you: I hurt people.”

“Some people deserve to be hurt.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t, but I hurt you anyway.” Erik blinks at that assessment. She shoves her hands in her pockets, makes a startled noise when her jeans slide down her hips. “Ugh. I look like I spent an afternoon behind the bleachers with the football team.”

The thought is close enough to his to be amusing, much like the looks they get as they enter the mansion. He is thinking about that more than where they’re going, thinking with surprisingly little pain about the dim murmur of his father’s cursing at some recalcitrant household item (a door hinge? a shutter?), and when he realizes Genevieve has been leading them toward the first aid room on the main floor, it’s too late to veer off. Raven, hanging about there for no reason he can guess, has caught sight of his hand.

Genevieve points at it. “Did it again,” she says glumly.

“Did a good job of it, too,” Raven says with disturbing cheer. “He did shoot me in the leg once, so don’t feel too bad about it.”

“You shot me in the neck shortly afterward and knocked me unconscious with your foot. I think that makes us even.”

"In my defense, I was kind of saving lives at the time."

“Jesus H. Christ on a fucking triscuit,” Genevieve mutters before Erik can form a reply. “You guys have crazier lives than the people on _The Young and the Restless._ ”

She stomps off, still muttering profanity, holding her jeans up with one hand.

“I like that kid,” Raven says, watching Genevieve’s retreat with a strange expression that it takes Erik a moment to identify as fondness. “She’s like a teenage girl version of Alex, but with more brains and an even bigger chip on her shoulder. And man, can she swear. You should check it out when she’s training. We’ve all learned new words.”

She eyes him. “So, why does it look like you two spent the morning ripping each other’s clothes off?”

“Shut up, Raven,” Erik sighs, and Raven grins.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit random, this one, but I figured it was time for a fight. :)

 “Amazing…” McCoy says to nobody in particular. He is pink-skinned and furless today, and has changed very little from the awkward young man Erik first met in Richmond. One eye is magnified hugely by a lens. He stares at Erik’s hand like it’s a puzzle instead of a swollen mass of lacerated, blistered flesh, and pokes at one purpling knuckle. “These cuts are from the _inside_. It’s almost like your hand was cooked in a microwave.”

“Fascinating.”

“ _Yes_. I want to look at—“

“That was sarcasm, Hank,” Raven says from where she lounges in the doorway to the lab picking at a fingernail. “Most people aren’t going to find their own sliced up, nuked hands fascinating.”

McCoy looks up, then back down at his hand, and utters a disgruntled little _hmph_.

“Well…it _is_ fascinating. But the scan showed no damage to the bones, or to the muscle tissue beyond the swelling, so honestly, you got off easy. If her power works the way I think it does, she could have exploded your hand.” McCoy turns in his chair to pull open a cabinet and rummage inside. He emerges a second later with a syringe, a nondescript jar, and a roll of medical gauze.

Erik eyes the needle, tensing and knowing how stupid that reaction is. He hates this lab, as he hates all labs; the antiseptic smells, the sly points of scalpels hiding in drawers waiting to be used, the sterile steel of examination tables. He stills himself as McCoy leans closer. Some of it must make it to his face. McCoy hesitates, gaze flicking briefly but tellingly to the exposed tattoo on the inside of Erik’s forearm, and he hands the jar to Erik without a word, keeping just enough distance not to crowd.

“I developed it a few years ago,” he says, making no effort to look away or lighten the moment. Erik finds he’s both irritated by this and oddly grateful. Charles’ occasional efforts to pretend away what he picks up from Erik’s mind have only ever underscored the fact that he has done so. “It accelerates healing for anyone with the mutant genome. You still won’t be able to use the hand for a few days, and it’ll probably be painful for a week, but this should speed things up considerably.”

Erik contemplates the jar, then delicately wraps his power around the metal lid and unscrews it. “I just smear it on?” McCoy makes a small affirmative sound, though not a particularly confident one, as though the thought of doing something as imprecise as _smearing_ pains him. Or as though this is not how he would normally proceed. Then he deliberately turns away.

“I’m not a child,” Erik snaps, seeing this gesture for exactly what it is.  

“Some days there isn’t much evidence to support that,” McCoy snaps back.

From the doorway Raven sighs a quiet “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” but doesn’t volunteer to join in. McCoy glares at her, which is honestly more spine than Erik thought he possessed where Raven is concerned, and fiddles with the contents of a drawer.

“McCoy, if you have something to say—”

Something clatters loudly in the drawer. “So many things, Erik, I hardly know where to start.”

“Guys...”

“Pick a point and dive in, that always works for me.” Erik sets the jar down, smiling grimly. McCoy turns to glower at him. There’s a faint but satisfying blue tone creeping over the skin at his hairline.

“ _Guys_.”

“Your methods aren’t anything I want to emulate,” McCoy growls.

“ _ENOUGH_ ,” Raven bellows. It echoes off the walls. Clearly McCoy’s newfound backbone only goes so far: he all but salutes at that tone. Erik realizes he’s sat up straighter on the table and has to stifle the urge to deliberately slouch, thinking of Genevieve. Raven stalks into the lab and plants herself between them.

“For Christ’s sake,” she snaps, “we’re holding this school together with spit and duct tape and fucking cheez whiz, there’s an NBC Special Report tomorrow night on the fucking _mutant problem_ , we have three new kids coming in next week, one of whom apparently speaks nothing but fucking _Finnish_ , and there’s more than enough raging testosterone to deal with upstairs in the student body in any given five minute period, so do you think you two could stop pounding your chests at each other and pretend to be adults for five fucking minutes?” She rubs her hand over her hair and blows out a sigh. “Jesus. And I was so sure I’d get through today without yelling at anybody. Shut up, Erik,” she says, pointing, though Erik hasn’t even opened his mouth. “He’s _helping you_. I realize that’s grounds for a beheading in your world, but out here where the rest of us live we just try to say thank you every now and then. And congratulations on pissing Hank off enough to get the needle away from your arm, but I’m pretty sure you’re still going to need that shot.”

Erik feels a prickling heat climb up his neck into his face. He does his best to stare Raven down, which works exactly as well as he expected it to: she just leans closer, gaze lingering on his hot skin for a second, and raises a brow.

“And _you_ —” she says then, wheeling around to point at McCoy, who flings a hand up as though to wave her words away.

“You always end up on his side, Raven,” McCoy says bitterly. “He shot you—he tried to _kill_ you—and still, the moment you heard he was in trouble you showed up here after what, eight years of avoiding this place and everyone in it? to ask Charles to find him.”

“That’s what family _does_ , Hank,” Raven snaps. “We try to get over ourselves and take care of each other even when we’re complete assholes. You’re not immune to being an asshole on occasion. I myself have been an asshole plenty of times, but that didn’t stop you from dragging me to safety in Cairo, did it? And don’t try to pretend you’re still all the way on the other side of things with Charles, believing the world’s all rainbows and, and kittens: you know as well as I do we’re going to need all of us for whatever’s coming next.”

“Kitt— _what?_ What does that even mean? Charles doesn’t think that!”

“Oh please, of course he does!”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Raven bristling is still an amazing sight, and an oddly literal one: when she’s this angry, the scales on her arms tend to rise. “Oh don’t I,” she says. “Let me tell you what I _do_ know. I know I spent the last decade pulling mutant kids out of cages and labs and freak shows. I know this place is safe for mutants only when they can _find_ it, therefore only for a handful of lucky ones. I know there’s a bill for the registration act coming up this fall. I know anybody who takes two minutes to think about this shit has got to be tired of it, and that includes you. And I know you’re building an _armed stealth jet_ in the basement that comes up out of the basketball court, Hank, so it’s a little late to claim you’re okay with the status quo. Why did you want me to help you argue Charles into the X-Men?”

“Not to start a war!”

“It should’ve occurred to you by now we’ve been trying to _stop_ one!”

“Oh, is that it! Because that’s gone really well, Raven, bravo.”

They are nose to nose now, and McCoy is as blue as Raven is, the seams of his clothing straining, his thick-framed glasses looking ridiculously tiny among the fur and fangs.

“I’ll leave you two alone to sort this out,” Erik declares, still somewhat stuck on _armed stealth jet in the basement_. 

“Nuh uh,” Raven says without looking away.

“Nope,” McCoy says, eyes boring into Raven’s.

“Yes,” Erik says, and stands. Because he distracted and anything he does in this mansion is doomed to be marred by idiocy, he hits his injured hand on the corner of the table. The swollen skin below his knuckles splits and pain leaps up his arm in a jagged rush. There is certainly plenty of blood now.

“Shit,” Hank blurts, and moves in a blue blur to cradle his hand. Raven snatches the gauze from the counter and stalks over, unwinding the roll.

“Fucker,” Erik sighs. Raven utters a startled hoot of laughter.

“That kid’s rubbing off on both of you.” 

“Quiet,” Hank snaps. “Hold still, Erik.” Little choice now, is Erik’s sour thought, but he does as he’s bidden. Hank retrieves the syringe and injects the contents just above the big muscle between Erik’s thumb and forefinger so swiftly Erik doesn’t even blink. Numbness blooms from the injection site: his hand begins to feel heavy and cold, and he has to lock his knees against the sudden relief. He doesn’t quite manage to swallow his sigh.

“Er,” someone says from the doorway, and they all freeze.

“Peter,” Erik says carefully.

“ _Peter_ ,” Raven says not at all carefully, giving Erik an intent look that nobody in the room could possibly miss. Peter is in a simple, sweat-stained shirt and track pants, goggles around his neck and hair sticking up in several directions. He hovers at the threshold with enough uncertainty in his face to make Erik wonder how long he’s been standing there listening.

Raven frowns. “What is it?”

“I, huh. I actually forgot what I was going to say,” Peter says, eyes on Erik’s hand. “I mean, wait, no, something about Bea blowing a sentinel up? Jean says to just ignore the smoke, it’s cool. Holy shit, d—um, dude. Who ate your hand?”

“Christ,” Raven sighs.

Erik doesn’t look up from his hand, which now being painted with the contents of the jar: he can feel that his expression isn’t doing at all what he intends it to. That aborted syllable is vibrating inside him. Hank glances at him once, then quickly away, and pulls the gauze from Raven’s waiting hands. He wraps it efficiently around and over several times.

“You’re not going to want to hit it on anything else,” Hank mutters.

“So I gathered,” Erik mutters back. Hank’s gaze lifts once more: even in this form the impatience on his face is plain. “ _Thank_ you,” Erik adds.

“You’re _welcome_ ,” Hank growls.

“Well, that was beautiful,” Raven says drily. “I may weep. Now come on, hug it out. Wait, let me get a camera. Make it fast, before Bea blows up my danger room.”

He thinks he can raise his face now without giving away everything. He pointedly does not think about whether Raven did that on purpose. “There will be no _hugging_.”

“Definitely not,” Hank says, backing up. Something they agree on unreservedly.

“So…um. How do you feel about checkers?” Peter says, and Erik draws a large breath.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And back to Peter, because I <3 Peter.

Peter is absolutely terrible at checkers.

To be fair, he doesn’t appear to be trying, and Erik isn’t much better, as he hasn’t played checkers before and five minutes in, he can’t understand why anyone would ever want to.

“I dunno how you get to be fifty without playing _checkers_ , man,” Peter says for the third time, and brushes a fly out of his silver hair. They are in one of the gardens near what will be a pool, if it’s ever finished: right now it’s a raw-looking hole in the ground.

“I’m forty six, actually, and I haven’t really had much time for games.”

“You got started pretty early, then,” Peter mumbles, and winces. “I mean, er. It’s cool and all, it’s not like I’m sorry you and my mom did i—er. So you and the Prof do the chess thing, though, yeah?”

He doesn’t know where this conversation is going. He supposes it doesn’t matter: _anything_ , he’d said, and he meant it, though if he’d had something in mind, jumping pointless plastic pieces over other pointless plastic pieces while trying to think of something to say to his adult son ( _Mein Gott_ , his son, his son) probably wouldn’t have been it. “We do,” Erik says, daring a quick look at Peter’s face. Peter is looking at him when he does, so this results in an uncomfortable level of eye contact. “Do you play?”

“Nah. I don’t—it’s long, you know? I’m not so good at sitting still. Everything’s already slow enough.”

So his mutation alters his perception of time, too. That sounds difficult. “When did your powers manifest?”

“Grade school.” Peter looks away, moves a piece over two of his and collects them. “My hair was kind of blond before that, actually, and then one day it just, you know, wasn’t anymore. Well, it took like four days. I stayed out of school for a while after that, until I, you know, got a handle on things. Stayed back a grade too. But me and school never really got along anyway.” He blows out a sigh, puffing his cheeks, and shakes his head in a quick, irritated flick of motion that Erik can feel in his own neck muscles: _he_ does this.

So did Edie Lehnsherr.

He unfreezes himself when Peter looks him in the eye again. It feels like everything in his chest has stopped working. He digs the nail of one finger into his palm.

“So when did you meet my mom? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“You can ask anything you want,” Erik says, though he can’t deny he’s dreading some of the answers he might have to give. He thinks of a boy showing up silver-haired to school, dealing with his peers’ stares and bullying, trying to fit in. “Your mother, she didn’t…”

“She never said, no. My real mom died when w—when I was seven. Cancer. Her sister Jo-ellen took u—over from there. She’s been Mom ever since, mostly.”

Cancer. The images he has of that disease do not fit with his memory of Nadya Maximoff, who joked that her shaved head made her look wiser the day after she was brought to the camp; who used to hiss Romani curses at the guards’ backs in the yard; who held his hands in hers for hours the night after his mother was killed and never said a word. Who after Shaw separated him would press her palm to the wood-barred glass of his cell’s single window every day when her shift was over, risking a beating or a bullet to offer a split second of comfort.

Who kissed the tattoo on his arm when they met again by chance three years after, and spoke of finding peace together.

Who in the months that followed reacted with silent wonder to every wayward display of his powers, except the last, deliberate one.

“We were in Auschwitz together,” Erik says roughly, because the whole of what Nadya was is far too much to say. “She was…she was very brave.”

Peter is silent, rubbing two checkers between his fingers, staring at the ground. “I remember asking about the numbers on her arm when I was little,” he mutters. “She told me evil leaves a mark, but good plants a tree in your heart that grows toward the light. She was always saying things like that.”

She’d said the same thing to Erik over and over in their brief time together, until he’d brought a tiny, sad scraggle of a pear tree home one day and set it on the kitchen table in silent exasperation, and Nadya had laughed so hard she sat on the floor.

Erik stares at the top of a spruce and nods. “Dude,” Peter says wryly. “I can get more napkins.”

“No. I’m fine. I just—I haven’t thought about your mother in a long time.” He risks another look at his son’s face, sees the wary curiosity written there, and shakes his head. “We were together for only a few months, in Dusseldorf, three years after the war ended. Then I encountered a man who was a…doctor…in the camp, a man who did terrible things, and who worked for a man who did worse. I’d been looking for him when Nadya and I ran into one another.” He hesitates, trying to decide how much to say: Peter deserves honesty, even if that honesty drives him away (and Erik fully expects it will), but this isn’t a darkness he’s ever wanted to lay at anyone else’s feet.

“You killed him,” his son says: it is not a question.

Oh. ”Yes. I learned what I needed to know to find the man he worked for, and then I killed him.”

“Good,” Peter says, then rubs the back of his neck, looking abashed. “I mean, well, no. I’m not really on board with the whole killing thing, and my mom really wasn’t, and neither is my aunt. But. It’s not like I wasn’t ready to kill crazy-apocalypse-dude in Cairo, you know? I used to think you—well, you scared me, and my aunt thinks you’re the devil, but I…I dunno what kind of person it makes me, but I guess I can see how maybe, with some people, it seems like the only way, sometimes.”

He gives that eerily familiar shake of the head again, an echo going back more than three decades that calls forth a flood of such undiluted memory it feels like it pulls the heart right out of Erik’s chest.

 _Himmel donnerwetter_ , he is _not_ going to cry sitting in front a terrible board game.

“There are times when it is,” he says, because he still believes that, regardless of how much ground he and Charles might find they have always had in common. His voice isn’t quite steady, but Peter does him the favor of ignoring this. Or perhaps Peter doesn’t notice: there is an intent, hungry look to his gaze, and Erik understands that this particular conversation is something Peter may have been looking for.

Not for the first time, he wishes for Charles’ presence: Charles has always been good at providing comfort alongside his unflinching honesty. Erik only has latter to offer.

“I don’t regret killing him, or any of the Nazis whose lives I ended later. Some people make this world better only by leaving it. I do regret the damage I was responsible for along the way, how…blind I was to anything but revenge. Your mother was one of many people I pushed or drove away in pursuit of it. She was right to leave. She was even right to keep the fact of your existence secret from me. I…don’t think I would have been a very good influence in your life at the time.”

But he would have tried. He knows that much.

He picks up a checker, for no reason but to have something to do with his hands. “You’re better than that, I think. Better than me,” he adds, in case that wasn’t clear, though he suspects it was.

“Erik, man,” Peter says. “If I thought you were that bad, I’d have left the candle in your room and coasted on by.”

He wonders how many times Peter thought of doing just that.

Erik sets the checker down, slides it desultorily forward one square. “You don’t know me that well, Peter. You barely know me at all.”

“Hmph,” Peter grunts, and takes three more of Erik’s checkers. “Well, it’s true, this is like the third conversation we’ve had, so not much basis for an opinion. But you helped save our asses in Cairo, and then you came back here and built a new school with Jean in like three hours, which was pretty badass, by the way, and you’re basically the only person Veev will put up with. And Tamin basically wants to _be_ you, which—well, yeah, maybe that’s not so great. Also, the Prof is all _people are complicated but there is so much good in him_ , and if anybody has a reason not to think you’re okay, I figure it would be the Prof.”

Of course he would say that. And of course, Peter had asked.

“Charles isn’t infallible,” Erik replies, throat aching with that mixture of resentment and longing that is still, after twenty years, his response to Charles’ inexplicable faith in him. “I have done terrible things. I won’t promise you that I won’t do more someday.”

“I put a kid in a coma when I was fourteen.”

Erik looks up, surprised. His son wears a stony, closed expression utterly unlike his usual self-deprecating cheer. For the first time, he thinks he can see something of himself in Peter, and now that he can he wishes he couldn’t. “I know that’s not really on the same scale, but. I told myself it was because I didn’t know how fast I was, but you know, that wasn’t true: I’ve known since I was ten how fast I am. I just didn’t know how hard it would be to pull back when I was pissed off. And…I wanted to hurt him.”

“What happened?”

Peter gives a twitchy shrug. “He was an asshole, I was an easy target, what with the hair and stuff. He liked to push me around. One day I pushed back, and he, um, broke my nose.”

“You have a right to retaliate when you’re attacked.”

“I fractured his skull,” Peter says grimly. “He was a dick who broke my nose ‘cause he was showing off for a girl, and he spent more than a month in the hospital, and he couldn’t talk right when he came out. For all I know he still can’t talk right. I fucked up his head.”

There is a tightness to Peter’s jaw; his hands on the remaining game pieces move too quickly.

“It sounds like you learned something from it,” Erik murmurs, which is probably no comfort at all. He barely remembers school: it became a sporadic thing long before the Gestapo came for his family, a private, furtive thing conducted in basements and attics. He has few memories of the cruelty of children.

Peter chews on a checker, accepting that answer—or possibly just accepting the uselessness of that answer, Erik has no idea. Erik wonders how many grubby children’s hands have touched that checker.

He thinks of Nina’s hands when she was three, covered in all the accessible food in the kitchen, in sticky drying milk and dirt and the fur of half a dozen different animals.

For a moment he chokes on the memory of the smell of her hands—and then his son hawks the checker overhead in an explosion of breath and spit, and Erik is too surprised and disgusted to mourn.

“ _Ugh_ ,” a familiar voice says from behind him. A gust of wind from nowhere pushes past him, scattering checkers and board, and blows Peter back nearly half a meter. Peter slides in the grass grinning like a village idiot, his black tee shirt flapping up into his face, exposing a pale belly. “Peter, you have no _manners_.”

Ororo stands behind them with her hands on her hips, her slender frame at odds with her stance, her expression, that aggressive shock of white hair.

“Ro, you know I love you,” Peter says, flopping back to stare up at the sky, still with that silly grin on his face. “But I think you mean class. I have no _class_.”

“How is this not manners?”

“A good question,” Erik says, wiping a stray strand of saliva from his cheek.

“You see? Listen to your father.”

Erik ignores, as best he can, the twist that puts in his chest, and gets to his feet. Ororo smiles up at him, shakes her head at Peter with obvious affection, and waggles her finger at them both in a manner that suggests they are truant from something. “Come on, come on, the professor is looking for him and _you_ ”—she points an accusing finger at Peter—“are supposed to be in the Room. Raven had many things to say about your absence.”

“ _Shit_ ,” Peter breathes. “Shit shit shi—”

Then there is only a chaotic backdraft of dirt and leaves, and the distinctive _fwip!_ sound of his leaving. Ororo shouts easy laughter at the treetops and brushes dirt out of her hair.

“Such a power,” she says thoughtfully. “I like to see him do that.”

“As do I,” Erik says after a moment. Though it is more than a little unnerving: Peter could be standing next to him, in the split second between his steps, and he would never know.

“He’s a good man, your son Peter. He doesn’t think he is, but he is. I’m glad he told you who you are to him, Erik Lehnsherr.”

She says his full name with careful relish, exactly as she did in the aftermath of Cairo, the two of them standing stunned and hesitant among Charles’ bleeding, groaning X-Men while McTaggert arranged transport via less official contacts: the syllables sharp with her accent, the tone one of relieved recognition. She has made a home here, by what little he has seen of her—spending her mornings teaching Arabic, her afternoons training with Raven, her meals in the cafeteria surrounded by students. She makes it look effortless.

He thinks it likely takes a great deal of effort.

Her first words to Charles, uttered while the dust was still settling and they were looking for a stretcher to carry him out, were _I’m sorry, can I come with you, please, I was wrong and I’m sorry_ , and they had made Erik’s skin pebble with gooseflesh, so close were they to what kept trying to leap out of his own throat.

She looks at Erik now with a layer of understanding he knows nobody else will see in her eyes: they have both stood on the other side of the line for their own reasons, and crossed over for the same one.

“I think we’re still trying to learn what I am to him,” Erik replies, because with her he can; the line is still there, and she knows it.

Ororo pats his arm, careful of the bandages.

“Be a friend,” she says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: I made Peter's mom a Nadya because two Magdas would have been a hell of a weird coincidence, or some bewildering sort of name fetish. Also, there's no Anya in my headcanon, because a) Marvel clearly appropriated a mangled version of that storyline for Nina, and b) I don't think Erik could survive losing two daughters, even with a quarter of a century in between, and stay sane.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew. This took longer than I thought it would, and is longer than I expected. I actually have a few more chapters, but I'm thinking they might form a later piece in the same world of this fic. Maybe? I'm not sure yet. I'm a novelist, which means ~25K is sometimes how I clear my throat: it's occasionally hard to know when to stop. :p
> 
> Thanks so very much for coming along for the ride, everyone. You are the awesomest of awesomes. <3

Playing chess with Charles has always involved verbal fencing in politics and philosophy, and odd, unexpected connections that do not so much form as peel back, like an onion: each layer less comfortable. This chess game, held in the old den which by its collection of books, whiteboard, and leather furniture has been commandeered as some sort of staff room, is almost silent. It reminds Erik of the halfhearted game they’d played on the plane to Paris ten years ago, except that it lacks that sharp edge of misery.

The news tonight was full of pieces on global restoration efforts in the aftermath of Cairo, the efforts of the United Nations to review the Geneva Conventions ‘in light of mutant capabilities’; a senator intoning solemn promises about the benevolent intentions of the registration act; a shouting match between pundits regarding the definition of American citizenship where mutants are concerned. Erik had forced himself to leave before he destroyed the TV; the reception was starting to suffer. Charles had flicked it off the moment he stood, then sat staring at the wall as he walked out, looking desperately weary.

So: silent chess.

He is on edge, waiting for Charles to spring some appallingly personal remark on him—Charles only keeps his thoughts behind his teeth for so long, and the longer it goes on the more invasive it will be—and planning a lure with his rook that may or may not be obvious.

The ceiling above them thunders intermittently but ominously with students’ feet: lights-out in the school is never a quiet time. Why it needs to involve running Erik will probably never know, but there is a nightly race down the halls.

Erik realizes, suddenly, that he’s been here long enough for this knowledge and the noise that fostered it to have become utterly unremarkable, and he accidentally swallows too large a mouthful of scotch.

“I do hope you fixed the steel beams that hold this ceiling up firmly in place,” Charles murmurs without looking up from the board.

“Had you warned me I would need to build to withstand regular stampedes, I’d be more confident.”

Charles smirks at his queen. “I’ve yet to witness what sort of mischief they get up to right before bed, but I suspect it involves some form of tag.”

“Tag,” Erik repeats blankly, remembering flimsy metal necklaces the American soldiers had worn when the camp was liberated.

“The game, you know. Oh, no—you don’t.” He blinks. “Well, basically it involves one person running at everyone else and everyone else trying to run away.”

Sounds thrilling.

“I did that for years,” Erik says, because he is tired of waiting for Charles to decide what he’s going ambush him with this time. He moves a pawn forward. “But I called it Nazi-hunting.”

The hand Charles flattens over his mouth does nothing to catch his bark of surprised laughter. “That’s really not funny,” he says, shocked but still laughing. “Christ, Erik—”

They’re both spared the impending argument when the door swings wide, admitting Raven, Hank, Ororo, and Peter, and a wheeled cart rattling with bottles and glassware. Erik stares at this invasion. Charles sighs. “I take it Scott and Jean are on hall duty tonight,” he says, and slides his queen’s bishop forward. “Checkmate in two, by the way. I think that might actually be my record.”

“Kurt is helping them,” Ororo says.

Damn it, it is checkmate. Apparently the silence had a purpose beyond brewing intrusive comments after all. Erik scowls and tips his king, caught between irritation and admiration: it is a good tactic, very much a Charles sort of tactic.

“Dude’s not exactly hall monitor material, though,” Peter says around a mouthful of chips.

“And you are?” Raven snorts. “Ugh, give me a drink already, Hank, I’ve been yelling at teenagers all day.”

Clearly they’re settling in. It is a staff room, Erik supposes. Leaving now will be a blatantly obvious retreat, but possibly worth it. He looks around for the Zelazney novel he’d been reading when Charles came in. It’s on the other side of the room, in the middle of a crowd of mutant teachers who appear to be planning to get drunk.

His life, he thinks dourly, has taken some fairly unexpected turns in recent months.

“Occasionally we meet here after hours to decompress,” Charles explains, both amused and apologetic. “Or celebrate.”

“Or recover,” Hank says under his breath.

“Ah, another day in paradise.” Charles waves his glass at arm’s length. Ororo plucks it out of his hand with a nod, handing it to Hank. Hank, who is now mixing…drinks. This may be one of the odder sights Erik has ever seen. He thinks again of retrieving his book and getting out, but right now it’s sort of fascinating. “Who was it this time?”

“Raquel, Jube, Bjorn, and Tamin.”

“Tamin,” Ororo sighs. “I don’t think that carpet can be saved. And the _smell_ …”

“That kid,” Peter says, puffing his cheeks out, “needs a shock collar.”

“I _made_ the lozenges—“

“Doesn’t do much good if he spits them out, man.”

Raven snatches a bottle from the cart, pours it and then Coke over ice, and does something violent to a lime. “I’m making the next person who screws up in the Danger Room follow him around with a fire extinguisher for a week,” she declares. “At least he’s stopped calling himself Dragon Man, I was going to stuff him in a trash can if he kept that up.”

“Oh he’s definitely moved on,” Hank mumbles to his drink.

“Glass houses,” Charles says, pointing at Raven, exactly what Erik was thinking. “You, my dear, have no place throwing stones at any young mutant who wants to try on a different identity.”

Raven glowers at her brother over the alcohol. “Not the same.”

“No?” Erik hears himself say. He scowls away a wince: he was still thinking to slip out quietly in a bit, but it’s too late now. This is the sort of argument he never could pass by. “The boy has a right to decide what he wants to be called.”

Now they’re all looking at him.

“Well,” Charles says, in the tone that means he’s about to switch directions and play devil’s advocate, something between playful and provoking with a helping of smug. “There is _something_ to be said for holding onto the name one was born with, yes? It's important to keep yourself tethered, as it were: to remember who you are and how you became you.”

“Bullshit,” Raven breathes. Charles’ eyebrow demands an explanation. “Some of us need to let go of our pasts, Charles.”

Her brother stiffens. This is about to become a very different argument. Judging by the tensing hunch of Hank’s shoulders, he’s bracing himself for it, too.

“Human names, given by human parents,” Erik scoffs, with no doubt as to what reaction this will get him. And predictably, Charles sends an arch and irritated look his way. “If the boy wants a name that connects him to his mutation, that’s good. That’s healthy. He’s embracing it.”

“Oh, please. Most mutants come from _human parents_ , Erik. Present company included. Most mutants for the next four generations at least will have _human parents_. Some will have human children. We’re not a separate species, despite your occasional dramatic speeches to the contrary. One gene sequence does not make us separate: we _are_ human.”

“We’re a bit more than that,” Erik insists.

“More,” Charles repeats flatly. “Do tell.”

Peter and Ororo sit on the couch, moving almost simultaneously. They keep a careful distance between them, and every line of their bodies shouts their awareness of that distance. Aha, Erik thinks, and is surprised by the warm rush of pleasure he feels at the thought of his son and Ororo Munroe finding each other, if that’s what they’re doing. It certainly looks like they’d like to.

“We are separate, Charles,” he says. “We’re _different_ , in a world where the different are treated as less, feared, confined—removed. We have to fight for the things others are given freely. Your school wouldn’t exist if that weren’t the case. Choosing what others call you is choosing how others see you: it gives a mutant a measure of control over how he’s viewed by a hostile world that defines him by his differences.”

“Or her,” Ororo says mildly.

“Or her.”  

Charles has that frown line in between his brows now that means he’s dug his heels in. “And just how is taking a mutant name not _allowing_ the world to define you by your differences?” he demands. “Allowing it to separate you from what makes you _like_ everyone else—your birthplace, your parents, your family, your childhood, your community?” He knocks his knuckles against the chessboard with every item on the list, getting excited. “The arguments for the registration act and different definitions of citizenship for mutants are based on the notion that we have nothing in common with ordinary humans, Erik; that we can be treated as other because we are other. It’s just as important if not _more_ important to claim what makes us the same as to claim what makes us different!”

“ _Du spinnst wohl_ —” How the man has learned so little in twenty years, it’s staggering. Erik can feel his eyes beginning to narrow. “It’s more important to fight the process of isolation and degradation than it is to try to _blend in_ , Charles!”

Charles’ expression has heat now: he caught the translation from Erik’s mind. Or perhaps he’s finally learned rude German phrases out of self-defense. “You are _infuriatingly_ stubborn.”

“Likewise!”

“Well, sports fans, I think the pot and the kettle are tied in overtime for the _millionth goddammed time_ ,” Raven announces to the room at large, prompting a snort from Hank and a weird, nervous half-grin from Peter. Ororo, on the other hand, looks like she just watched a documentary on giraffes: slightly bewildered, a lot bored.

“They are both right,” she says, her tone suggesting she can’t figure out why she needs to state the obvious.

“Welcome to my world.” Raven bends over the cart to mangle another lime, and shoves a full glass at her brother. “Here, Charles, drink this.”

“What, may I ask, am I drinking?” He obviously doesn’t care, since he puts it immediately to his lips.

“Cuba libre,” Raven tells him, utterly deadpan.

Erik feels his jaw drop. Charles spits the drink all over his cardigan. “Jesus _Christ_ , Raven,” Hank says, and covers his eyes with one huge, furry hand.

“You,” Charles coughs, “are absolutely the worst sister who ever sistered.”

“You love it.” Raven hands him a napkin. “Somebody’s got to keep you on your toes. Clean yourself up, Charles, you look like an Oxford graduate.”

“For heaven’s sake.”

“I was thinking of Quicksilver,” Peter says, venturing bravely into the fray with a non-sequitur. Charles sends him a wounded look. “Uh. I mean, not while I’m hanging around here, or at my mom’s, who would take that—probably not so good—but when we’re busting kids out of places and shit? Yelling out our real names isn’t a rad thing to do at a time like that.”

“Good name,” Erik says, trying to ignore another of those distracting, messy twists of emotion that Peter can drag out of him sometimes just by existing. He doesn’t look at Charles, not wanting to see it reflected in Charles’ too-expressive face. It feels loud even in his head.

“Storm,” Ororo says with complete confidence.

“I see I am outnumbered,” Charles sighs, and knocks back half his drink in one swallow. “Try not to look so smug, Erik.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Too late, Erik Lehnsherr,” Ororo tells him with a grin.

“Mutant code names,” Charles mutters, sounding like somebody’s cranky grandfather. “ _Dragon Man_. Good lord, what next?”

“The boy will figure it out on his own, _Professor X_.”

“Not everybody wants one,” Hank grumbles, and drops into a chair across from them with an ominous creak of taxed furniture joints. “And Tamin’s already moved on. Demonstrably. It’s a pity you missed your moment of triumph, Erik, he banged into my history class this morning yelling _make way for Dragneto_ , which wasn’t exactly—”

He stops talking, or at least Erik thinks he does: suddenly he’s working too hard to keep a straight face to really care. He sets his empty glass on the chessboard and splays a hand over his brow, holding his breath against a fit of mirth. Beside him Charles is making no effort at dignity, wheezing quietly into the sleeve of his cardigan like a man half drowned. Raven has turned toward the wall, her hands braced on her hips, shoulders shaking.

“I should have gone with the sameness-identity/difference-identity argument, that was good, but…I was _stumped_ ,” Hank says to nobody in particular, baffled and oblivious. “I mean, what do you do? I wasn’t going explain the concept of drag to a roomful of ten-year-olds.”

“Well somebody probably ought to now,” Peter hoots. Ororo covers her face.

 “My god, you guys,” Raven whispers blissfully. “The spring talent show is going to be _magnificent._ ”

That image is too much for him. Erik slumps into the back of his chair, laughing so hard tears start from his eyes and he has to brace a heel on the carpet to keep from slipping onto the floor. Charles, in no better a state, manages to knock over half the chess pieces somehow: he flaps a hand uselessly at them as they fall. Erik swipes his palms over his face, trying to rein himself in. He feels drunk. Dragneto, _Gott im Himmell._

He is never living this down, any more than poor Tamin, and he can’t even care.

“ _God_ ,” Charles pants. “Oh, oh bloody hell, that’s…I don’t even know. Poor you. What did you do?”

“I taught _history_ , Charles,” Hank says severely, and the tenuous grasp on control Erik was beginning to achieve vanishes: he folds forward, unable to get a breath, and clutches at the chair’s arms. “But I did make him take the colander off his head and the bedsheet from around his neck, he looked like a Star Trek alien.”

 “Well, he’s probably not going to want flammable material for the cape, now is he. I’m so glad you find this so amusing, Erik, because I plan on bringing it up every—every t-time you—oh, good _lord,_ I can’t breathe.”

He can’t speak yet without making an ass of himself (though it’s clearly too late to worry about that). He waves a rude and clumsy gesture across the chessboard instead. Charles waves it right back.

Raven sits on the floor. “Mutant and proud,” she moans, waving one fist in the air. Hank’s bellowing laugh shakes the glasses on the cart. “Charles, if Erik’s Dragneto, you know that makes you Professor Sex.”

 “ _Verdammt_ , Raven,” Erik gasps, and slides most of the way out of the chair.

“Everybody shut up,” Peter pleads weakly. “Just please stop talking. Oh, jesus _fuck_.”

Mercifully, everyone does. It still takes an embarrassing amount of time for him to get hold of himself, and an equally embarrassing amount of effort to pull himself upright. He hangs on the arm of the chair, winded. “ _Ikh darfn dem vi a lokh in kop_.”

He hears the Yiddish a second after it leaves his mouth and blinks.

“Wha?” Peter squints at him, red-faced and panting. “What was that?”

“He said _I need this like a hole in the head_ ,” Charles says foggily. He offers a crooked smile when Erik stares. “I had a friend at Oxford who spoke Yiddish. She had the most colorful expletives.”

“Friend,” Raven snorts from the floor. “Hah. You didn’t come back to our flat for two weeks, Charles.”

A wave of pink travels from Charles’ neck to his hairline. “Well. Anyway. I learned quite a bit from her— _don’t say it_ Raven—mostly the more exasperated bits. She had quite a temper.”

Erik, wiping his eyes, turns over the idea that Charles knew something of the first language of his childhood the whole time that he has known Charles. It is strangely unsurprising. He raises a brow in challenge. Although the expression likely lacks much actual challenge, since he still can’t quite get the smile off his face.

Charles grins like a cat. “ _Er zol vaksen vi a tsibeleh, mit dem kop in drerd_ , my friend,” he says, startling another weak bark of laughter out of Erik, “…which covers my feelings about your position on mutant separatism quite nicely.”

_“Shtik drek.”_

“Lovely, Erik. Very mature.”

“Okay, is somebody going to translate?” Raven says, clambering to her feet.

“He told me I should grow headfirst in the ground like an onion,” Erik says, before he is surprised by a yawn. A pleasant weariness is invading his limbs: he could be content to sit unmoving here for hours, days, months, sipping good scotch and listening to Charles and Raven snipe at one another, Hank wax philosophical about tests and teaching methods, Ororo and Peter try (and fail) to be subtle in their flirting. “And I told him he was a shithead.”

“Wow. All of your philosophical arguments summarized in a pair of insults.” Raven swipes a hand over her face and reaches for the Coke again. “Maybe next time you two could skip the two decade lead-up and just get right to calling each other names over drinks, hm?”

Erik meets her eyes, hearing the razor edge of sincerity in the joke, and sees her small smile, the cool appraisal in her gaze. She used to give him exactly this look in the moments before every mission, when he wondered at the last minute whether he could somehow put her at the back of the charge inside without belittling her, what he would do if she were hurt or killed, what her brother would do, if he would know or Erik would have brave the mansion gates and Charles’ justified wrath, helmet in hand and broken heart on his sleeve, to tell him.

The years with Magda and Nina were agonizingly short, but they were enough that he now knows what the word for this is.

“It does sound like a more efficient use of time, doesn’t it,” Charles says, so noncommittally Erik can’t tell if it’s indifference or something else entirely. Charles has an excellent poker face, in the rare moments he wants to.

Then again, indifference has never been one of Charles’ faults.

 His chest still hurts from laughing. He leans over to steal Charles’ half-drained drink from the table and wash away the sudden iron in his throat with too-sweet alcohol, meets the eyes across the table—that ridiculous, endless shade of blue, the second thing he’d noticed after the shock of a voice in his head—and smiles.

“Maybe,” Erik says. “I do have a lot of insults.”


End file.
